There’s a variation of an old political game being played out in the US these days. I can’t remember exactly the last time Canadians played it but here’s the setup, a politician looks up the grant information for a funding organization such as the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council in Canada, scans the titles for the research papers, picks out a few at random, holds them up for ridicule and as an example of poor government investment, then asks the public to speak out or protest this waste of money.

Recently in the US, the Republican party decided to create a website titled, YouCut (I appreciate the word play on the YouTube brand), featuring a video of a very personable politician holding up a few recent research grants from the National Science Foundation (NSF) as examples of ridiculous research and a waste of money. The site also features instructions for how citizens can look up NSF research grants for themselves and nominate their choices to be included in a YouCut report.

Pasco Phronesis (David Bruggeman) outlined concerns about the program’s execution (he notes that the US politician spearheading is looking at a wide range of government programmes, not just NSF funding)  in a Dec. 3, 2010 posting,

The execution of this project is pretty lousy, targeted at political outcomes much, much more than making meaningful policy changes. Looking at the targeted programs in the YouCut program, most of them are relatively small in terms of funding (this week’s candidates are all under $50 million – a tiny fraction of a percentage point of the federal budget), and many seem to be targets more for political purposes than actual fraud, waste, unnecessary duplication or abuse. The reporting mechanism is particularly lousy as it won’t be able to collect any meaningful data about grants or programs. It’s more about what people don’t like, without room for any explanation. Finally, a program like this, placed on the website of a political operation, makes it really easy to politicize the whole thing, and roll it into some pale imitation of Senator William Proxmire’s grandstanding back in the 1980s. ‘Great soundbites’ lousy policies.

Pasco Phronesis goes on to support the principle of asking for feedback,

That said, I see no reason why the public shouldn’t provide feedback to the National Science Foundation (NSF) and its grantees about grant proposals that they think are duplicative or wasteful. It is public money being spent, and if grantees can’t explain their work to the public, I don’t think they’ve earned the right to it. There is the matter of how such feedback is conducted.

Dan Vergano in his USA Today article about politicians and science funding, How some politicians stumble on science, gives a little more detail about the ‘ridiculous’ research cited in the YouCut video,

So, as you might expect, when we asked the National Science Foundation about the two grants that Smith [Republican politician] mentioned, we learned a little more about them.

For example, the soccer study turns out to be computer scientists studying how remotely connected teams form to conduct “nanoscience, environmental engineering, earthquake engineering, chemical sciences, media research and tobacco research.”

And the “breaking things” study turns out to be acoustics experts ” pursuing fundamental advances in computational methods while solving several particularly challenging sound rendering problems,” so that the U.S. military, among others, can create more realistic combat simulators for troops.

“These aren’t about soccer research,” says the NSF’s Maria Zacharias. “All of these projects go through our very rigorous peer-review process,” she adds, part of what made the NSF the only one of 26 federal agencies to receive a “green” rating from the Bush administration in its initial rating of government management practices.

Vergano concludes his article by noting that history behind some of these tensions in the US,

Since 1950, when NSF was founded, a tension has existed between the decision made then that peer review — scientists scoring each other’s work to fund the most worthy efforts — would be the way to fund research, rather than doling it out as earmarks from politicians, which was the other big idea favored by some then. “Experts are in a better position to know what’s worth the money and what isn’t,” Teich [Al Teich, science budget expert for the American Association for the Advancement of Science] says.

Zacharias suggests that researchers need to work harder to let the public know “lab mice, soccer players, other critters” are just tools for scientists trying to answer complex questions, not an end in themselves.

“In the laboratory there are no fustian ranks, no brummagem aristocracies,” wrote Twain, putting it a bit more elegantly. “The domain of Science is a republic, and all its citizens are brothers and equals.”

From a science communication perspective, the YouCut website/video, the discussion on the Pasco Phronesis blog, and the article by Dan Vergano provide some useful insight.