Empowered by Republican control of Congress and the White House, the House Science, Space, and Technology Committee will pursue an agenda based on “innovation rather than regulation,” according to a summary of committee priorities released 1 February. The committee will focus on agency rule making, oversight of cybersecurity standards, and “rebalancing” NASA’s priorities, said chairman Lamar Smith (R-TX) in an accompanying statement.
Many of the Science Committee priorities build on legislative and oversight efforts that began during the previous session of Congress, when the House passed a number of the committee’s bills. On 23 January the chamber passed the bipartisan Department of Energy Research and Innovation Act, which incorporates seven House-passed committee bills from the last Congress. Among its numerous provisions, the bill would provide the first-ever comprehensive policy guidance to the DOE’s Office of Science and its national labs.
In his statement Smith emphasized that DOE should “limit spending on late-stage commercialization programs that distort the energy market” and instead prioritize basic research. “Critical reforms are needed to ensure the Department of Energy spends limited federal research dollars on discovery science that the private sector cannot conduct, not loan guarantees and subsidies,” he said.
Smith also intends to address “major facilities reforms … under the paradigm of the National Science Foundation.” The House passed Smith’s NSF Major Research Facility Reform Act last June in a nearly unanimous vote, and some of the less stringent provisions in the bill were incorporated into the American Innovation and Competitiveness Act that President Obama signed into law earlier this year.
In recent years, to build a broad consensus in Congress and with the Obama administration, Smith and his colleagues sometimes softened bills before they came to the House floor. Now that Republicans control Congress and the White House, Smith may revisit some of the more contentious provisions of his committee’s legislation from last Congress.
Smith will continue examining the use of science in Environmental Protection Agency regulations and rule making. In a party-line vote in March 2015, the House passed the Science Advisory Board Reform Act to require that scientific and technical viewpoints on the EPA Science Advisory Board be “fairly balanced” and satisfy other requirements. Around the same time, the chamber also passed Smith’s Secret Science Reform Act, which requires that all scientific and technical information used in EPA rule making be publicly available online “in a manner that is sufficient for independent analysis and substantial reproduction of research results.” The committee will return to those bills and topics on 7 February for their scheduled hearing on “Making EPA Great Again.”
The committee will also examine recent administrative rule making on the social cost of carbon, set by the Obama administration, which, according to Smith, will “push a costly climate agenda with little transparency or accessibility by the American public.” He provides no indication as to whether he will continue investigations into scientific studies and findings released by the science agencies. Starting in 2015, Smith made requests and issued subpoenas to access National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) correspondence and other documents connected to a study related to the global temperature record.
Smith specifically highlighted the importance of US leadership in space science alongside human space exploration. As in the past, Smith is calling for a shift in NASA’s portfolio. With a Trump adviser having suggested that NASA earth science may be better suited for another agency, the balance between earth science and space science at the agency is likely to emerge as a point of contention over the next few years.
The chairman is also promising that his committee will examine cybersecurity standards, which NIST plays a leading role in developing and validating. Smith has cited concerns about China’s recent successes in hacking into federal systems, including NOAA’s weather satellites.
Ranking committee member Eddie Bernice Johnson (D-TX) indicated in an emailed statement that Democrats are prepared to work with Smith but will not back the chairman’s full agenda: “I’m disappointed, but not surprised that the Chairman’s agenda for this Congress includes pushing anti-science bills designed to interfere with EPA’s mission to protect public health and the environment and cutting investments in clean energy at DOE,” she wrote. “That said, I stand ready to work with him and want to seek good bipartisan policy agreements in areas across our jurisdiction.”
This article is adapted from a 3 February post on FYI, which reports on federal science policy with a focus on the physical sciences. Both FYI and Physics Today are published by the American Institute of Physics.
