Planetary Radio: Space Exploration, Astronomy and Science - Space Policy Edition: The Big Picture on U.S. Science Funding

Episode Date: February 5, 2021

Matt Hourihan is perhaps the world's most knowledgeable expert in how the U.S. government funds basic science and development activities. He joins the show to talk about the big picture of where the money goes, how the focus has changed over time, and the consequences of budget cuts to critical science investments. Discover more here:  https://www.planetary.org/planetary-radio/0205-2021-spe-matt-hourihanSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Welcome back, everybody. This is the Space Policy Edition of Planetary Radio, coming to you as it is intended to on the first Friday in February. That's when this program becomes available. I'm Matt Kaplan, the host of Planetary Radio, and I am joined once again by our Senior Space Policy Advisor and Chief Advocate at the Planetary Society, Casey Dreyer. Welcome, Casey.

Hey, Matt. Looking forward to getting super wonky on this episode with you and our listeners. Just a quick plug we have coming up very soon, the guest this month is Matt Horahan from the American Association for the Advancement of Science. He is the director of the R&D Budget and Policy Program there, and we go into it on federal investments in basic science research and development.

It is super interesting, a little broader than what we tend to talk about in terms of just space on the show. But he is an expert, and you've probably seen a lot of the work he has done, whether you know his name or not. So look forward to that interview coming up soon. It's fascinating. And I think, you know, the Venn diagram of this would be what Matt deals with as a big circle, and what we usually talk about as a small circle entirely in that big circle. I think that that, especially for those of you who really tune in to hear the inner workings in DC, you will not be disappointed by this conversation. Here's something else that you won't be disappointed by. We've got PlanetFest coming up. PlanetFest 21 to Mars and back begins on Saturday, February 13.

We have the greatest program. It really is, especially for a virtual event, I am blown away by the caliber of guests that we are picking up for PlanetFest. You should check it out at planetary.org slash planetfest21 and see this amazing lineup, not just of people who will be joining us on panels and in other sessions, but the topics that we will be covering. And one of those sessions is yours, Casey. Yeah, Matt. Well, speaking of really exciting guests, I will be there, as you mentioned. So we will be doing an advocacy workshop for how do you advocate for Mars as part of PlanetFest.

And then I will also be chairing a session on the future of human spaceflight. And we have Rick Davis from NASA's Science Mission Directorate. He's their lead exploration staff there talking about what it takes to get humans to Mars. So both of those that'll happen on again, February 13th and 14th. And I should also say this is our first Planet Fest in almost 10 years. This is a big deal. Virtual, as you might imagine. So I think, you know, it's like only 30 bucks for two days of great content. And, and we'll throw this in for free. You will not get COVID by attending Planet Fest. That is a free bonus. And if you're a member of the Planetary

Society, it's even cheaper. I think it's $20. All of this, all the details are where I said, planetary.org slash planetfest21. Casey, that last Planet Fest, do you remember where you were during that climax, the seven minutes of terror? Matt, you were standing right next to me as we watched Curiosity land on Mars. That was a very profound moment in my life. And that was, I think, three or so weeks after I was hired at the Planetary Society. So that was a great start to my now almost nine-year tenure here. I mean, that was jumping up and down, thrilling excitement. Not just the two of us, of course,

but the thousands of people who were there with us in the Pasadena Convention Center. And you'll have a chance to do that again. Yeah, it'll be virtual. But join us when on Thursday, February 18th, Perseverance goes through seven more minutes of terror because Bill Nye will be hosting our special sort of value-added coverage of Perseverance's landing there in Jezero Crater.

You've got even more reason to be excited this time, right? I mean, you have a direct connection to the mission. Yes, I married a direct connection to the mission. My wife is on the Mastcam Z camera team. She was on the team when they proposed the camera way back in 2014. So I have seen her and her colleagues work on this mission for more than seven years. And it's a new experience to kind of share that kind of investment in the landing being successful, but also just truly appreciating how much work it takes to build things that go to Mars. It's just an astonishing amount. When you see this land on the 18th, and God willing, it will land safely, and it will be a great, exciting moment.

and it will be a great, exciting moment. That moment is the result of uncountable amounts of human hours spent working on that for many, many, many years, like planned down to the minutia. It's honestly awesome in the very literal sense, the amount of work that people are able to put into this. And this is what it takes to pull off this kind of exploration. Like the very fact, I'm always reminded, Matt, of, you know, of John F. Kennedy's statement when he was

arguing for the moon landing, you know, like, we do this, not because it is easy, but because it is hard. The very nature of exploration like this, the fact that it is hard is the value of doing it, right? You challenge some of the brightest people around the world to do some of the hardest things for purely peaceful motivations. It's just profound. And you see that kind of outcome and the inspiration it brings to people and the pathways and where they go after. It just really brings it home in a sense to see the value of this type of exploration. It's very inspiring. Here's to a landing on Mars by Perseverance that is just as exciting and successful as what we witnessed eight and a half years ago with Curiosity, which was so incredibly exciting.

Here's also to hoping that we will see a continuation of exploration around our solar system and more broadly, lots of science. You've got some news which I had not heard about. Some support for the Artemis human lunar exploration program that just came out today as we speak. Yeah, we're about, what, two weeks now into the Biden administration, two and a half weeks or so, give or take. And we're seeing a little bit of hints like the administration themselves hasn't announced any new policy. Biden hasn't spoken about it. I think the White House press secretary got her first question about Artemis either today or yesterday. She did not have an answer on it. But for those who are doubting necessarily the future of Artemis, again, I think we can put a little bit of those uncertainty to rest.

We saw a letter signed by 11 Democratic senators to the Biden administration asking them to request what they called full funding for the human landing system for Artemis going forward in the next budget proposal. Due any month now for NASA. And also to support, yeah, it's always a little delayed when a new administration comes in. But it's important, I think, because they simultaneously emphasize the need for pursuing lunar exploration,

but also for supporting NASA's science programs, which is music to my ears, because what we had seen over the last few years under the Trump administration was great support for human exploration. But then they'd try to cancel, you know, the Roman Space Telescope, they try to cancel some earth science missions, they try to cancel the Sophia Observatory. So what we'd love to see is an everybody wins approach, right, because then everybody wins. But it's eminently doable. Congress always restored the funding. So what you're seeing here is a good contingent of Democrats, including the one of

the highest ranking Democrats in the Senate, Patty Murray from Washington State, throwing their support very publicly behind Artemis, which is again, because of its, I'd say ties to the previous administration also gets a lot of support from Republicans, particularly in the Senate. So if the Biden administration really wants to, I think they could just continue to grow NASA at a healthy clip, support both of these efforts, Artemis and the robotic science missions. And that's like an easy political win. If they want that as a political win, I think it's there for the taking. And this is a good sign that you see that Congress is kind of saying, hey, propose this, we're willing to back you up on it.

Casey, you know what I take as a very good omen? It's that moon rock on display in the Oval Office. Right. Yeah, he got a moon rock to inspire him about what America can do when it wants to. And I would always just emphasize if I was talking to the president, which I have not, I should emphasize, but if I were, I'd say, you know, it's that moon rock did not just happen, right? You know, that took, as I've done the analysis, took about $280 billion to bring that moon rock back. It's not enough just to say, I want to do an Apollo style, you know, a moonshot, whether it's to the moon or to cure cancer or to whatever, you got to put the resources behind it. That's how they succeed, right? It took a lot of effort, both parties during the 1960s sustained commitment to ensure the success of Apollo. I think you're seeing again, there's a lot of positive signs about this. Again, I'd say reasonably the president and his administration are really focusing on the coronavirus pandemic right now.

That's obviously going to be the big focus. But, and I should maybe just tease this, by about next week, I'd say, in terms of the time of recording this, so February 10th or so, the Planetary Society will be releasing its formal recommendations to the Biden administration about, you know, what it should focus on in NASA. to the Biden administration about, you know, what it should focus on in NASA. You won't find too many surprises from what we've talked about here, if you're listening, long term listener to the show. But again, I think the opportunities to plan for the economic recovery, NASA is a part of that solution. And investing in space and doing these kind of hard programs that really invigorate and inspire people in the high skilled manufacturing, STEM fields, and critical thinking and peaceful, cooperative collaboration. These are all

opportunities that fit right in with what we're trying to do as a nation, whether you're Republican or Democrat. And seeing NASA as that tool, not as something that's done out there, right, but something that's done here on Earth for us, I think is going to be key into presenting it as a solution to a problem, rather a problem to be solved. I cannot wait to read those recommendations that you, on behalf of all Planetary Society members, and I'm one of those, will soon be forwarding to the Biden administration, Casey. Let's go ahead and dive into this wonky discussion that you have with your guest, Matt. Matt, I assume you mean that very positively.

Oh, how could it be otherwise? Wonks make the world go round. That is actually very true. And as you point out, I think we tend to talk about a subset. So this is like a superset discussion about overall R&D. And I think one of the key takeaways for me, and this is what I always wanted to talk to Matt about, is relatively, you know, the entire scope of US investment in basic science and development, the entire scope of US investment in basic science and development, it's about 160 or so billion a year, right out of a $4.5 trillion budget. If you accept all of NASA's all basic R&D, debatable, but roughly, you know, say 20 billion of that 160 billion goes to NASA. The other the

rest of it is goes to the Department of Defense. And it's kind of amazing how much this country does all things considered, like we're spending about 10% of all of our discretionary funding on science and basic development. Think of what we could do with twice of that investment. Right? We're literally benefiting now, very literally, from advances in basic research for mRNA vaccine development, CRISPR genetic, you know, all this genetic analysis and research that has been done for quote unquote, no return on investment by basic R&D over the last 40 years. But suddenly it becomes very, very valuable. This is a relative pittance that we spend as a nation. And it's kind of amazing to think about

what if we just push that up a little more, just think we, you know, let's just think of what we could find or what inspiration or what's, you know, scientific discoveries or what beneficial consequences to humanity are just waiting to be discovered. And so, you know, that's kind of the subtext of this discussion. It's not as if perhaps our major competitor across the globe is not doing the same with its investment in R&D. really isn't in question whether it's a valuable use of funds, right? I mean, that we go back into the 1940s Vannevar Bush with the Science, the Endless Frontier report, where he basically pitched that it's a very new concept that the government spends public money on science for the benefit, you know, not just for the pure good, but also

as a fundamentally an aspect of national security, you know, can we compete on a technological global world? an aspect of national security? You know, can we compete on a technological global world? So it's always a little baffling to me that even though the fundamental argument is no longer in question, we still have to argue for the application of that, in a sense, through the budget process every year, we have to beg, cajole, you know, push people to say, you know, push a little bit more to this basic R&D because we guarantee benefits to the nation in the long term and very likely short term too. Well, we'll keep pushing. But for the next few minutes, we'll be listening to Matt Houraghan. Anything else you want to say before we dive in?

Let's go right to it. All right, here's Casey with his guest. Well, Matt, thank you for coming on to the Space Policy Edition. Glad you're here. Thank you for having me. So before we really go into a broader discussion of federal R&D, I think it might be actually quite useful to just really quickly define what we mean by it. If there's a more technical aspect, I think we all have a general idea of what research

and development kind of stands for. But I was thinking about this today. How do you define research and development kind of stands for. But I was thinking about this today, like, how do you define research versus development? Why are why do we talk about these two aspects of what we tend to lump together? Yes, that's a that's a great question. So the technical answer, right, is that the definitions for these things are actually established officially by by OMB, the Office of Management and Budget at the White House. And we can, you know, think of basic science as the quest for fundamental knowledge, you know, an understanding of natural phenomena. Applied science, we're starting to move into taking that knowledge and, you know,

and pursue experimentation towards some kind of a particular use, the creation of a technology, a process, some kind of an artifact. And then development goes a little bit deeper into that creation of a concrete product or process in a specific use that is intended ultimately to result in some kind of a usable technology. Now, having said that, one of the things, one of the distinctions I like, there's a book, I believe it's called Cycles of Invention and Discovery, and folks can look that up on their preferred search engine. But it's a great book on the research enterprise and tackles a lot of, gets the question of basic versus applied research, and why do we call them this? And it develops an alternate approach to talking about R&D and science and technological development.

But one of the distinctions they make that I really like between research and development is the idea that research is unscheduled, right? It's creative, experimental activity, trying to answer questions and develop knowledge, whereas development is a scheduled kind of activity. When we're doing systems engineering to actually take the ideas underlying some new technology and actually build a device, build a prototype with a certain set of milestones and cost targets and things along those lines. I mean, that is development. And maybe the last thing I'll say is that for federal purposes,

there really aren't that many big funders of development, right? The bulk of the development enterprise is really the Pentagon, the military branches, building new weapon systems and tanks and planes and communications platforms and what have you, that accounts for the bulk of development. NASA, unsurprisingly, accounts for a big chunk of the development of the non-defense development. Then you've got like DOE and transportation and a couple of others. But really, when we talk about development, the biggest by far chunk of that is the defense weapons and technology acquisition

system. Research, on the other hand, that's like the domain of the National Science Foundation and the Office of Science at DOE, NIH, and parts of DOD as well. But research tends to be a much more non-defense civilian-oriented activity, whereas development, again, it's Pentagon, a lot of it, it's military, it's weapons and national security technology, with some left over for space exploration and others. Would development be something like creating an observatory or putting the gravity wave observatories, for example, kind of taking a new concept and then deploying a brand new application? Or is it more of a

technical idea than that? So I mean, like you talk about with the Pentagon taking and creating these new like physical things, like willing something into existence almost out of these new theoretical constructs. And do you see that also in a more limited sense in terms of how we develop new ways to interrogate the cosmos or the natural world around us through like instrumentation? Possibly. You know, the reality of it is that what gets called development versus research, I mean, it can be very subjective. You know, each agency that funds these activities has its own people. I mean, they all work from the same, in theory, work from the same definition. But they all have their own people, their own research investigators or contractors or whoever, to try to work with them to help characterize and classify what to call the activities.

The other thing I didn't mention is that there is another category known as R&D plant. It's a small portion of the overall pie, but R&D plant refers to facilities and equipment. Something like LIGO, I don't know, but my guess would be that portions of that that were federally funded, the development of the tool itself and the hard technologies themselves, some of that may have been development when they're actually trying to create the tool itself. But then you've also got this other category for R&D plant, where once they've created it, they've created a working technology, then they've actually got to go build it in reality. Things like lab construction, I mean, that gets characterized as R&D plant. Research vessels often will get categorized as

R&D plant. So that's a whole other category. It's not a huge portion of the overall pie. It's a relatively small slice compared to research and development, but that would also account for a lot of the things that you're talking about. So you mentioned Pentagon development and also they do research too. And let's maybe make a big cleave in terms of how I think we're going to talk really about R&D going forward, at least in terms of my interests. You have kind of the Department of Defense in the United States, and then you have kind of all the other agencies in terms of the pot of money that is spent on R&D funding from government. Can you just briefly address that outline? And then we can dive down into some of

these other agencies. But how is this division? How, you know, roughly, what is that division? What does the Pentagon spend? Is that kind of considered separate? Is that similar in kind to what we do in terms of civilian R&D? Or is it really a specialty application of it? That's a great question. So I'll start with the outline first, right? So the overall, and I'm just kind of going to speak in very much in generalities here, so the overall federal R&D budget is about $ 160 billion, roughly, you know, give or take. About half of that,

these days, a little bit less than half, I think, is Pentagon R&D. So the remainder would be mostly non-defense. The other piece that we haven't mentioned is the National Nuclear Security Administration, which is a defense agency that is defense R&D spending, but it gets counted under the Department of Energy, which is a, you know, most of its other programs are non-defense programs, its research programs, especially. So it's a fairly even split. Complicating things is also the fact that they've actually changed around what they count as R&D just within the last few years. So it used to be that defense was slightly more than half. Now they're slightly less than half because of some accounting changes that we can get into if you really want to, but that gets pretty wonky pretty quickly. So DOD is about half. Now,

is it similar or different? I mean, again, most of the defense spending, it's defense contractors, it's like Raytheon and other such contractors actually trying to build new systems. That said, DOD does fund a pretty substantial research enterprise as well. Now, a lot of that is going to be intramural, Army labs, Air Force labs, et cetera. But they do fund a fairly substantial extramural research enterprise as well. And that includes universities, might include other national labs and perhaps some for-profit firms. You've got agencies like DARPA that are within the Pentagon that fund all extramural research. And so a lot of that stuff, I mean, there may be some additional

rules and restrictions on it. We're talking about national security, of course. I mean, a lot of the people that talk about the importance of fostering a research enterprise, I mean, they don't, many folks don't really distinguish much in my experience between funding from NSF, DOE, and other, you know, other such agencies and DOD, DOD is a funding source. So I think once you get, you know, especially on the basic science side, right, the fundamental stuff, I, you know, it's not sure if I would see much of a distinction, but I think it's more once you get further down the pipeline, right? That's what I was wondering, though, is, is basic research from DoD done with some sort of applied eye, you know, as opposed to something like NSF, which is going to give potentially like a grant for someone to look to refine the cosmological concept or something very abstract, fundamental, very not applied? applied. Does the DOD say, well, we'll do basic research, but it's always force feeds forward into some defense purpose. And that to me, you know, strikes me as like a distinction in kind almost

that it's DOD funding is not done for just the benefit of greater human knowledge. It's always done for a national security purpose, theoretically. Yeah, that's true. That's true. But that's also kind of, you know, I think that's fairly similar to, you can kind of characterize a lot of NIH research like that, right? I mean, they're not just doing it to expand knowledge, they're doing it because they want to eventually understand disease to be able to treat it. You know, basic science coming out of the office of science, right? Some of it is very much pure knowledge, basic science coming out of the Office of Science, right? Some of it is very much pure knowledge, as you described. Others also have an eye toward some kind of a use. But yes, DOD would definitely wholly categorize as use-inspired basic research, if you want to call it that.

Yeah. And I wonder if this kind of just gets to the larger purpose of why does government spend money on research and development? Like, it's not going to be purely for curiosity, right? Like, it's not some highly minded, purely high minded reason, right? It's going to have in political system, it has to have some sort of reason, right? And reason on some at least relatively short to mid range times. To your point about the National Institutes of Health, it's kind of the same point, right? And reason on some at least relatively short to mid range times. To your point about the National Institutes of Health, it's kind of the same point, right? Like it's not just to understand DNA better or how viruses work better. It's to understand how viruses work

better in order to make better treatments for them that were clearly benefiting today. And I don't know if it's just me, or I feel like there's a lot of people who just kind of react negatively to the idea of Department of Defense research getting so much compared to what we call civilian but it may just be a distinction without conceptual distinction without a real applicational difference by the way that you're kind of phrasing it and when it comes down to it people are still doing basic research. And it almost doesn't matter as much where the money is coming from. I think it, to some extent, I mean, because there is a long history of, you know, defense technology spinoffs. So there are some real world, you know, non-national security, right?

ARPANET, right? Yeah, exactly. I'd say it's a notable one. Yeah, as we speak over the internet now, I mean, here we are. So one thing I'll say, just in terms of the dollars. So it's worth noting the non-defense, and this is off the top of my head, but the non-defense research budget is probably something like $80 billion now, the Defense Department research budget, right? So not development, but just research. That's, I believe, about $7 or $8 billion. So, I mean, it's like 10 times, in terms of just research, I mean, the vast majority of it is on the non-defense side. So I don't know if that helps you feel any better. Well, no, that's a good distinction, right, to what you were saying earlier.

Most of the Department of Defense is going to be the development side of things. The big projects, yeah. Yeah, yeah. So let's move on. So I'm going to kind of just wanted to talk about the defense side. And generally, you know, for my interest, and I think most of our audience, we're going to focus on the civilian side. I just wanted to touch on the defense side, because when you look at the numbers, and

I should say, we'll link to this in our show notes. But if you go to the AAAS.org website, you can see a lot of Matt's work under the budget and policy resources area. I see your plots that you generate and keep updated, basically used everywhere. Everyone, anytime someone talks about science spending, they'll grab one of your charts, stick it in their talk. And it's like, yep, I can recognize that. The fonts and the, what I imagine is Excel tables

putting these together. So when we're talking about these things, you can go and reference the exact numbers online. They're just a fantastic resource. And it's one of the reasons, Matt, I'm such a fan of the work that you do is that you do such careful, thoughtful work with this. Thank you.

Thank you. And maybe we should say now that the URL is actually real easy. It's just AAAS.org, so AAAS.org slash RD. To your point, though, about overall R&D spending by the U.S. government, you said it's about 160-ish billion. We're just going to kind of do hand-waving numbers off the top of our heads for this. I want to put this in context, right?

Because this is something that is in terms of when we start to talk about the policy aspect of this. I'm really interested. I like this as seeing it as a percentage of what we call discretionary spending, right? The amount of money Congress decides to spend every year. This is distinct, right? Because a lot of people will put it as a chunk of overall U.S. spending, but something, what is it, three quarters of all U.S. spending is mandatory, right?

It's just automatically happening by law. And so it's not really a political, it doesn't represent a political statement or a policy statement, because it's already written into laws automatic spending, but the annual churn of terms of appropriating money, that's political trade offs, right? There's a process that Congress goes through in the White House proposes. And that kind of, I think, is a better gauge in terms of what priority does science occupy. And so you have some, again, great charts that show kind of over time, relative percentage of this discretionary

spending pot of US government's money that goes into R&D. You can break it out by non-defense and defense, which I like. And non-defense, give or take around seems 10% for about the last 30 years. So there's a story here. I'd be kind of interested to see your interpretation of this story. From my kind of broad interpretation, I'd say, you know, immediate peak of the Cold War, starting in the, well, probably starting earlier in the 50s, but really pick up data in the 60s. It peaks at about 25% of non-defense discretionary spending. Right. Space race.

Right. Then trails down. Is that all driven by NASA, that big bump? And then it was kind of this aberration. Then it kind of reduces back. And then from there on out, it's about 10 or so percent for the last 30, 40 years. You know, it's kind of gone up a little bit and then maybe in the 90s and then down a little bit during budget control.

But it really seems, I'd say, stuck at this level. And so of all the money the government decides or the Congress decides to spend every year, they say about 10% goes to basic or general research and development. That seems low. Like it seems it should be high. Like, is there anyone who's looked at the story of investing in science research and said, ah, you know, boy, I wish we hadn't done that. That didn't turn out well.

I'm really sad we have all these like mRNA quick vaccines right now. Like we really shouldn't have invested so much. How come it can't break out of that? And again, I wonder if it's because you had this external factor of a highly technological scientific competitor of a different ideological structure, which drove internal political consensus in the United States to highly invest in R&D in general? Or do you think it's more complicated than that? I think in terms of the space race, and then, you know, what's happened after the kind of, you know, I mean, I think of it as an equilibrium, really, since like the mid 1970s, roughly, once we got past the space race, because that big hump is that is entirely space race. In fact,

if you take a look at federal R&D by functional category, right? There'll be budget functions, there's a space function and other and agriculture and general science and energy and others. The space function is like it just absolutely explodes in the 1960s during Apollo. And a lot of people do look back at the space race and kind of think of that as these golden days when federal R&D was much bigger. Well, it was bigger because of the space race. Take away space and then, you know, Cold War defense related spending, most of that hump disappears. And so, you know, again, obviously, you know, the motivations for the space race

well known and, you know, are what they are. Since then, I think you're right. And it was driven by that international competition with national security undertones that has been mostly missing on the non-defense side for my lifetime, basically, more than my lifetime. So there's a couple things here I think worth noting. Number one, annual appropriations is an incredibly decentralized process rife with trade-offs, as I think you mentioned. If an appropriator, and this is partly tied up, I think, in budget resolution and some of the big rules governing the annual spending process. But I mean, if I'm a champion for NASA or the National Science

Foundation or whatever, and I want to see a big plus up, well, first off, if I'm a champion for science, I mean, I can't just like wave a wand and plus up science overall. I've got to plus it up across multiple agencies and multiple spending bills. And each one of those spending bills is where a lot of the trade-offs happen because when overall spending is going up, often spending increases kind of get distributed and kind of handed around the various spending bills. And there are 12 different spending bills. Sometimes you'll have some prioritized over others, no doubt, but there's a lot of continuity in the system. So when spending goes up for one bill, it goes up for several. And then even if spending is going up in a single spending bill, okay, let's say you want

to plus up funding for the National Science Foundation. Well, in this day and age, NSF in that spending bill has to compete with the Justice Department, NASA, the Commerce Department. And so if there's extra funding in that bill, there may be a lot of people who would love to see increases for some of the science programs in that bill. But there are also a lot of people who care a lot about DOJ, FBI, U.S. Marshals, among the other programs, some of the Economic Development Administration, to throw out an example. There is an enormous array of competing interests and competing demands on the federal budget. So when we look at this long-term R&D equilibrium that you've identified, I mean, I think that's probably the

most likely answer is simply the fact that the demands for science and R&D spending have never really superseded. They've stayed even with other demands on the discretionary budget and all the different things that government does. Line items in the federal budget, they're there because somebody wants them there, right? Somebody thinks they're important, you know, all the way down from like from NASA, all the way down to like, you know, the Marine Mammal Commission or whatever. You know, I mean, there's a lot of different things we expect government to do and different constituencies expect government to do. So breaking out of that equilibrium, it's very difficult because of all the different things we want government to do. Now, the one thing I will point out, though, so you're looking at the

top line, right, the non-defense R&D top line, if you were to drill down and separate that out by different agencies, you'll actually see a somewhat more complicated story. While total non-defense R&D has been very stable within the discretionary budget, what's happened over time is that some agencies, and these are mostly basic science funders actually, so the National Science Foundation, the Office of Science within DOE, NIH certainly, these have actually increased as a share of the discretionary budget, the non-defense discretionary budget. So that goes back like 40 years and it's not perfectly smooth, but it's fairly clear. So the story there is that over time, appropriators actually do seem to be trying to prioritize some of those

kinds of agencies. On the other hand, other research funders like USDA would be a big one, EPA, and several others, they have declined as a share of the non-defense discretionary budget. And again, these are very kind of gradual trends. They're not super extreme for the most part, but they're there. So, I mean, it does seem like Congress has been for many years, and again, this is going back like 40 years now, has been trying to some extent to prioritize some of those basic science funders, but they've deprioritized environmental research, agricultural research, possibly like infrastructure research and transportation. I'm not sure where those numbers are. So there is a bit of a differentiating differentiation, even within the non defense R&D budget, which is kind of interesting. There's like three things I want to follow

up with that. This is something I noticed while working through some of your numbers the other day for a talk I was giving to your point about the story beneath that top line about, you know, so we've had non defense spending on R&D be about 10%, let's say, for the last 30, 40 years. But in that context, you've seen the rise of the National Institutes of Health to be, I forget, something close to $40 billion a year now, like almost half of all non-defense R&D funding now is at the NIH. Within that 10% envelope, you've had the growth from almost zero to now half of that being occupied by the NIH. So that kind of says that something had to give in order for that NIH to grow to that portion. And so yeah, there's been like these huge changes

in the makeup of that 10%. Your point, I think, is well made that the there's no single science pot of funding in the US appropriations process and the congressional appropriations process, as you said, is distributed through a bunch of different agencies. And some of those agencies, you said USDA, EPA, Environmental Protection Agency, obviously, NASA, National Science Foundation, Department of Energy, despite that they all share some kind of science aspects of what they do, they're managed and overseen by very different committees. It is interesting. It is a hard, it's kind of amazing in a way that it has maintained overall about 10%. Yeah, I call that, I mean, it is, you're absolutely right, it is an incredibly decentralized appropriation system, right? There's 12 different spending bills.

Give you an idea, and your listeners an idea. I mean, there's 12 different spending bills. And I believe something like nine out of those 12 are responsible for at least a billion dollars in R&D and some, you know, a lot more. You know, there are six that are responsible for like two to at least two to three billion or more. So there's lots of different people involved in making lots of different decisions over lots of different pots for that overall R&D enterprise. I sometimes refer to that as the fact that it's at this equilibrium, seemingly,

and it has been for decades. Sometimes I call that the annual miracle. It almost defies logic. It doesn't make any sense that all these different people over decades can make different decisions and different trade-offs and we still end up at the same place. That's Casey Dreyer and his Space Policy Edition guest Matt Hourahan of the American Association for the Advancement of Science. They'll be back with more after this break. Greetings, Bill Nye here. Saturday, Sunday, a fleet of spacecraft including NASA NASA's Perseverance rover, is arriving at Mars. Join our live, online celebration. Planet Fest 21 is February 13th and 14th.

I'll be there with explorers, including Jim Bell, Katie Mack, author of The Martian, Andy Weir, NASA JPL chief engineer Rob Manning, and my old friend Phil Plait, the bad astronomer. Get your tickets at planetary.org slash planet fest 21 we're going to mars matt was that was that too much i i got into it there no you uh you nailed it boss would a better policy be to have a single let's just ignore the structures of congress for a second to say but would it make more sense to have a single pot of R&D money that is then distributed to agencies to use for their work? So you don't have the same kind of, so instead of, you maybe have, you have one congressional

subcommittee of appropriations that has the R&D account, and then federal agencies get doled from that. And so you could have one kind of champion focusing on overall R&D. Do you think that would result in better outcomes? Or would you be kind of stuck in the same type of system no matter what? I don't know, I think you'd still I mean, there are probably all kinds of challenges with that kind of an approach that I'm not seeing. I mean, I mean, if I read you right, and what you're suggesting, I mean, I think one of the downsides would be that you're reducing, I mean, doesn't that reduce the number of stakeholders that are responsible for allocating appropriations?

Kind of, yeah. Or it would create a very invested set of stakeholders. Like, that's the kind of the flip side, right? That you have a group committed to R&D as a concept and growing that. I haven't thought this through deeply. I'm just more kind of thinking, are there more efficient ways to allocate this? Or is this a fundamental limit of our system that we spread the oversight and allocation of federal R&D through so many different committees for so many different purposes? and allocation of federal R&D through so many different committees for so many different purposes? Yeah, I mean, I mean, it's a great question. It's kind of fun to think about. I mean, having, so concentrating the power and the interests, I mean, so there is a relationship between, and it's been, you know, been showed in the literature, there is a relationship between memberships of the various appropriations subcommittees and the geographic aspects of membership in those subcommittees and the, you know, the various institutions and constituents that they represent, right? So you're more likely to have to represent an army base if

you're on the defense subcommittee. Obvious to say, but, you know, statistically it's, you know, it's not just random. You know, as Tip O'Neill says, all politics is local. And so I do think it's worth thinking about if you bring down the size of, or bring down the number of appropriators who might be expected to care about R&D, I feel like that could very easily lead to a much more stratified system. Like what happens if the chair of that subcommittee, system. You know, like what happens if, you know, the chair of that subcommittee one year, it's, it's, you know, one Congress, it's somebody from Alabama, right? And so, you know, NASA exploration and, you know, NASA rockets are, you know, one of the big priorities. But then, you know, next Congress, maybe it's chaired by somebody from a district with a, you know, world-class research

university, and maybe it's less about NASA all of a sudden, and it's more about competitive grants from NIH. I'm sort of trying to think through the distributive implications of that. And it just seems like you'd be weakening. Maybe that's the question. Is it better to have a small core of extremely devoted appropriators, or is it better to have a broader core with varying interests, but who will go to bat for different pieces of the enterprise based on their constituent needs? I don't know. Yeah, we don't have to solve this problem today. Yeah, no, I mean, it's interesting. And that's a good point. Like in a system where you have geographical representation, like our Congress, parochialism can be a strength for science, right? You don't have to be a huge

fan of science if you have a large accelerator or something in your district and you want to keep jobs there. Then it's a very practical matter and science kind of rides along on that parochial interest of keeping that institution funded. Which is kind of how it works, right? Yeah, exactly right. Yeah. And in a the, the white house almost then acts as that centralized idea of saying tank kind of taking this overall view of R and D theoretically, that this would be a white house perspective. And so it's kind of balanced off anyway. All right, well, we can move on from my, uh, completely rejiggering, uh, the entire congressional apparatus, uh, for science, but that But that was, it's a good point.

But the point is fundamentally is that you have science R&D investment in the United States is this distributed system, a distributed process that doesn't have any kind of single point of pressure to increase. And the closest you would come, I think, would be through the annual president's budget request, which would kind of take and prioritize certain initiatives, cross government over others. Do you see this in other countries, this setup? Do you know, like, how much is this kind of a system that's replicated in nations beyond the United States? Or is this kind of idiosyncratic? Oh, it's very different. I mean, so we I mean, we have a you know, we have a presidential system in which the you know, we have the separation of powers. And we have an incredibly strong legislature when it comes to

funding issues. Most countries don't have that right. Think about, you know, parliamentary system, the executive grows out of the legislature or the parliament, and legislators basically have less of a chance to make big impacts on the budget. It varies country to country, but I think it's safe to say that in our system, in terms of budget matters, the executive is much weaker and the legislature much stronger than most other places. Having said that, does it make it easier for other countries to make kind of big strategic investments? Maybe. You look at the UK for many years, they have surprisingly underperformed in R&D investment. They're not as research intensive an economy as we are. On the other hand, you do have in the last, I don't know, 20 years or so,

if you look at like research intensity, the U.S. has been kind of slowly surpassed by Germany, some of the Scandinavian countries, Korea, certainly. You know, Korea, I think, is the world leader or I think they're number two behind Israel now in terms of research intensity overall. That's public and private sources. I don't know. I think it's, it's jury's probably out as to whether, you know, our system makes it easier or harder to make kind of sustained long-term strategic investments. You know, we've been obviously talking all about federal investment, but how does that compare to like private investment in the United States right now into research and development or from industry, I guess I'm mainly thinking of. Is there a fundamental difference in kind between the two? Are they complementary fundamentally at this point? Because you look at some of the charts,

again, on the AAAS website, and you can see industry scope of R&D appears to even dwarf what the federal government spends. Yes, for sure. So these days, the federal government used to be the number one funder back again, space race era, but industry surpassed the federal government right around 1980. And now industry funds roughly twice what the federal government funds in terms of R&D, is by far the number one funder of R&D in the US. But it is, as you said, it is very different. Industrial R&D is almost entirely deep, right? It's something like 80 cents for every dollar from industry is development.

And then of the remainder, maybe 12 or 13 cents or so is applied research. And then a small amount, five or six cents of every dollar is basic science, something like that. And that's from the industrial side. Government, especially on the non-defense side, is able to focus on basic and applied research. So non-defense, federal non-defense R&D is almost entirely R. That means, you know, the government is able to fund things like, or agencies like NSF, the inquiry that they fund. You know, government's able to take on riskier ventures and fund them in the long term with uncertain outcomes. Industry tends to not do that kind

of thing. And I say that with the major asterisk because, I mean, there are exceptions. There always will be exceptions. Lately, we have seen an uptick in what gets called basic research in certain sectors, certainly pharmaceuticals on the industrial side. The spending is up in basic science. A few other, I want to say, possibly aerospace, if I recall correctly, and a couple other sectors where basic science in industry is up, which is a good thing, certainly. basic science in industry is up, which is a good thing, certainly. Again, we've got kind of the long-term trend in industry away from higher risk activities, away from quite as much scientific collaboration. Some research has pointed to, you know, shifting cultures within industrial labs,

you know, and again, kind of painting with a very broad brush here. So we think about kind of the approach to taking on risk, the approach to kinds of uncertain activities represented by research. You know, I would certainly argue that industry and government are very complementary to one another. Government often does things that industry can't or won't, and then industry similarly does things that government can't and perhaps shouldn't. One example that I often like to point to is this agency ARPA-E, the Advanced Research Projects Agency for Energy. Relatively young agency, it's only about a decade old in the Department of Energy. And they fund transformational, innovative energy technologies. And the Government Accountability Office, which is a federal watchdog, took a look at them some years back and assessed whether the kinds of

technologies that ARPA-E funds, whether ARPA-E should be funding them. Could they have gotten private investment if ARPA-E hadn't picked up the research funding tab? And their finding was that even for venture capital, the least risk averse portion of or source of capital among industry, a lot of what ARPA-E was doing, most of what ARPA-E was doing was too risky even for them. So to me, that's kind of how I think of the federal enterprise overall. The government is able to take on a lot of riskier activities that industry is unwilling to. In addition, there are, of course, I mean, most of what, as we talked about earlier, most of what government funds has some kind of a mission

attached to it, right? Public health, national security, low carbon energy resources. I mean, that's, you know, to me, the biggest motivator, one of the biggest motivators for government funding R&D is because it ensures that we get R&D that fulfills these public missions. And it's not perfect. It's never perfect. But but funding R&D, you know, is a great way to ensure that you're fulfilling the public interest along many dimensions. I feel like there's a tension between this idea. I mean, I agree with you. It's like government should be funding areas that have higher risk or uncertain payout, right? I mean, that's like the essence of basic research and development. But at the same time, you know, we've seen this, I'd say growing trend over the last few decades, people in government or politicians, elected officials, looking for and highlighting what they consider to be absurdities or examples of wasteful spending of basic research. The very point of which that's what they're to do, right, to do things that may or may not work, that may seem weird, right, to provide that. I guess this tension, I guess, worries me at a

certain level. Do you feel like we still have a government policy that allows for failure of these types of things. Or, you know, the worry that I have is that you've with these examples are pretty high profile areas in terms of particularly ARPA-E, but other areas in which you hit on issues like climate, that there is a chilling effect, whether or not they fully defund or change these things that the agencies themselves turn to safest possible scientific investment. And instead, you spend a lot of money on incremental science and less on potentially transformative uncertain science by the consequence of over eager, I hesitate to call it public oversight, but politically driven public oversight. Yeah, I understand exactly call it public oversight, but politically driven public oversight? Yeah, I understand exactly what you're asking. I don't know if I have a good answer for that. I mean, I think the answer is yes, that there are spaces in federal agencies where there is room

for risky endeavors. I mean, you mentioned, you know, the periodic attacks on, you know, on silly sounding science. Certain legislators like to point to things that sound like questionable research. And they've been doing this for years. In response to that, actually, there's maybe just one thing I'll point out that we do actually with us and with partners, we sponsor something folks may or may not be familiar with this. It's called the Golden Goose Awards, and they're intended to actually highlight instances where absurd or silly or unexpected research results can lead to incredibly positive real-world impacts. For example, the PCR tests that we use now to detect COVID-19, Those tests have their roots in research around bacterial

life living in the hot vents. And I believe it was Yosemite National Park, Yellowstone National Park, one of those. And we actually gave a Golden Goose Award to the researchers who made those initial discoveries decades ago that eventually ended up leading to these modern tests for COVID-19. I mean, there's like a couple of angles to this, right? So number one, there's political attacks on silly sounding science. And I think that there are those who question a lot of research, but there are also efforts underway to push back against those narratives and try to educate legislators on the value of even science that doesn't seem like it makes a whole lot of sense. On the other hand, there's another kind of way at this question, which is which is the peer review system. Is it possible to get you know, are we getting risky enough science coming out of peer review?

Is it too conservative? And, you know, peer review is, you know, remains, you know, the way you get kind of the steady march of science. But, you know, it does, I think there is room for experimentation as well, right? Pursuing varied funding mechanisms like people-centered grants versus, you know, versus project grants, trying to use different models, you know, like Research Consortia and the ARPA model. There's various ways and we can kind of tweak the system and kind of build around the core, which is the, you know, peer-reviewed science and kind of the traditional peer-reviewed system to allow investigators to take on additional risk, to shoot for the moon, as it were, and, you know, perhaps be a bit more creative than they might be able to

within the confines of more traditional research. And I think there is a lot of interest in Congress in pursuing some bits of experimentation and how we fund science, how we approach it, what more transformational pursuits might look like. It's one of those things I feel like, just to put in the space world of which I'm more familiar, it's always easy to say you accept more risk. But when you actually deal with failure, that acceptance seems to dissipate. You know, I think about like the better, faster, cheaper program, two failures in a row, and that was done. Right. And suddenly, it wasn't cheap enough to fail. I think we do have this issue of where public oversight, I philosophically profoundly agree that the public should have

oversight over how we spend our dollars. But at the same time, we seem to have created a system that doesn't tolerate any failure. And that's only allows failure, you look at something like SpaceX, which is kind of able to fail publicly all the time, because it's a quote, unquote, private company. NASA couldn't fail like that, not only because it has that kind of oversight, but because it kind of symbolically represents national capability. And so scientifically supporting kind of wild ideas that may or may not pan out, the framework or the infrastructure we have to evaluate scientific value or potential or validity seems to err on the side of conservatism

in terms of what people are trying to do. I'm not quite sure how to use public policy to allow failure to occur without a reaction happening. I don't know if you can solve that problem, that'd be great. Yeah. Well, the other way to think about too is, I mean, there's larger profile technology endeavors that might cost, you know, several million a year, but then you have small scale research grants, you know, project grants that, you know, might be, you know, half a million dollars, you know, over three years. So maybe it's, I wonder if, you know, the relationship to risk and the acceptance or not of risk and failure probably is different for, you know, larger,

more visible projects that take up lots of public dollars versus smaller research grants that are less visible. You know, the sources of those, I guess the source of the conservatism might be very different depending on which kinds of programs we're talking about. Yeah, it always strikes me and I'd be curious to hear your thoughts or kind of how the impact of just overall R&D spending, how that's distributed throughout the country. So, I mean, I'll just say I'm married to a professional scientist. I see kind of firsthand when she gets a grant that it can be

what you're saying on the order of a few hundred thousand dollars over the course of a few years, but that helps pay her salary. A big portion of that goes to operating the university through overhead costs. A lot of it goes to paying students at a pretty minimal wage to do science. And you think about that scaled up, you know, we're talking about a few hundred thousand dollars. So if you're spending, you know, on the order of billions of dollars, that's a lot of people that you're supporting into existence. And that's a ton of students that you're allowing to work on science instead of having to flip burgers or something over the summer. It seems like pushing for even modest increases into science R&D, that

would have huge implications into the scientific workforce, but also just into the economy more broadly. Yeah, for sure. And there's, I mean, there have been studies that have been done that find pretty extended economic impacts across the supply chain, like federal grants that fund researchers in Ohio actually have knock-on effects when it comes to, I mean, of course, there's, as you mentioned, the students and the localized effects as well, but researchers that have to buy equipment, have to buy tools. I mean, the supply chain for those things that they buy, the materials that they buy, actually, that can have major ripple effects like coast to coast as well. So it is, I mean, there are some very, very real effects. You're absolutely right. of short-term surges in science spending as economic stimulus. And I'm thinking specifically

of, you know, in the 2008 recession, we had the Recovery Act and there was a, you know, a lot of, almost $20 billion in R&D kind of one time spent as part of the Recovery Act. There isn't a ton of research that I've seen yet that evaluates that, but what little I have seen suggests that there are actually some pretty substantial job creation effects that come out of federally funded R&D and that they potentially could be much larger than many other things that government might do. So there is real upside. Unfortunately, it can be hard to, at least as far as I'm aware, it can be hard to kind of get a handle on. Let me bring this to some of the work that you just recently did at the AAAS, which was what happens when you take money away from science. Here in the US, we just got out of this 10-year budget envelope of the Budget Control Act, which attempted to put significant spending restraints on discretionary spending, and I suppose some non-discretionary spending. discretionary spending, and I suppose some non-discretionary spending. You just did a recent analysis saying that, you know, even though Congress kind of reduced that restriction

a number of times over the last 10 years, something like $200 billion was basically removed from what should have been spent at the previous trends in R&D. Can you just talk about kind of how you got to that conclusion and kind of what implications does that have for science in the United States? Yeah, let's go back through the, travel back through the mists of time to 2010. We had the 2010 midterms. We had the Tea Party wave election in 2010. You know, the Tea Party, you know, especially in the House, exerted a lot of pressure. They represented, to some extent, a backlash to some of the big deficits that government ran during the financial crisis in the previous few years and other things as well. It wasn't just about the deficits, but

this kind of fiscal hawk energy kind of took the Congress by storm following the 2010 midterms. kind of took the Congress by storm in, you know, following the 2010 midterms. It led to a debt ceiling crisis. And eventually, Congress adopted the Budget Control Act of 2011 as a deficit reduction measure. Now, the Budget Control Act, it really did three things, most importantly, for our purposes, right? Number one, it set an initial set of spending caps below Congressional Budget Office projections, something like a trillion dollars less than government was expected to spend over the next decade. So that's number one, an initial set of 10-year spending caps. Second thing it did was it required the establishment of a joint congressional committee that would look at different ways to reduce the deficits, come up with some kind of a grand bargain, a mix of revenue increases and spending cuts and whatever. Democrats and Republicans get together. That's the second thing it did. The third thing it did is set up a contingency plan when that super committee, the deficit reduction committee, if it were to fail,

that committee did fail. And so the third step, the contingency plan kicked in. And that was a second set of even lower spending caps, again, over the period of 10 years, cutting another trillion or so out of the discretionary budget. So from the 2012 fiscal year, when the caps first took effect, through the current fiscal year, 2021, the Congressional Budget Office projected they were going to cut, you know, around $2 trillion over the decade out of the federal discretionary budget, which is where just about all federal R&D lives, discretionary spending. So obviously, this is, you know, major spending reduction below normal. Since those caps took effect and the law took effect on five different occasions,

Congress has adopted a series of spending deals to partially raise the caps a couple of years at a time, usually. And so in the end, spending didn't come down by as much as the original authors of the Budget Control Act intended, but it still came down by quite a bit, right? It slowed spending down, especially in the first few years of the decade, 12 and 13, and the 2013 fiscal year is when we had the big across-the-board cuts known as sequestration that took spending down for every program and agency. Since then, spending has grown a bit, but again, it's been shy of where it would have been. The question that I wanted to try to get at was how much did we actually lose because of these spending caps?

If you go back and you look at federal spending, federal R&D spending, and I just picked the 30 year period because we have good data on R&D budget authority over that time, and it got us past the space race. So I looked at federal R&D from 1978 up through 2008, right? So right at the start of the financial crisis. As it turns out, federal R&D on average grows by about 5.7% per year over that 30-year period. Not totally smoothly, there've been ups and downs, but on average, federal R&D grows about 5.7% a year. So I simply asked the question, how much would we have spent if we had simply maintained our historical average? And we allowed federal R&D for basic research, applied research development, but we simply

allowed it to grow at the historical average, no more, no less. So I projected that forward and compared that against what we actually ended up spending. And the results are, as you mentioned, I think cumulatively federal R&Ds is around $240 billion below where it might have been if we had simply spent at that historical average. That includes basic research, applied research development. Annually, we're talking about, at this point, we're talking about an annual R&D budget that's about $30 billion less than it might have been otherwise. So these are big numbers.

That's a lunar program difference. Yeah. These are huge. These are huge. So you asked me what we lost. I mean, it's hard to say, right? But I mean, maybe everyone who's listening, imagine what your favorite federal science agency might have done if they had an extra 20% in their budget over the past decade every year. What would NASA have done? Maybe we'd still have Arecibo. Maybe they would have done the repairs.

Maybe so. Maybe so. Yeah, no, absolutely. Maybe, yeah. I mean, but yeah, that's a lot of lost money. I was just looking at, they do a survey of recent, recent doctorate awards, people who just got their PhD and survey. Do you have a job? Basically is one of the questions they ask. And you can see the dip in the percentage of all recent doctorates in terms

of job prospects, right. During the beginning of sequestration Budget Control Act and continued downslope. And it's recovered somewhat in the last few years, but most areas of science, computer science is kind of the one exception, but most doctorates who are getting degrees are still below where they would have been 10 years ago. So seeing your article and then having seen that data, you really think about how many scientific

careers were forever stymied by this pointless cut? How many future scientists will we not have? How many future discoveries will we see delayed or not achieved? And it's impossible to answer that question. And then when you look at, of course, we should point out that the Budget Control Act failed in its goal. It did not reduce the deficit, the deficit continued to grow. And the US debt, I mean, exploded in the last administration, I think something added like almost $8 trillion. So these cuts kind of happened for no reason. There's no, they didn't achieve the goal. So it just, it just kind of adds to that just frustration. And I think maybe more also says like how responsive science funding is to the overall trends of

spending. Fundamentally, it's hard for them to buck those trends. Yes. And that's the problem with this equilibrium that we've talked about, right? Is, you know, the upside is that when things are going good, science tends to benefit sometimes more than other parts of the budget. But then we have, you know, we seem to have these these periodic fiscal crunches. Right. We had one, you know, back in 2010, as we're talking about. We've had them in previous times as well. And it was one in the 90s. There was one in the early 80s when, you know, the the kind of political equilibrium around science means that when spending comes down, well, science comes down with it. equilibrium around science means that when spending comes down, well, science comes down with it. And I'm not surprised, by the way, to hear that survey data regarding career prospects

for, I think it was for PhDs, you'd said, but I mean, a big chunk of the next generation of STEM worker, postdocs and grad students, I mean, they rely on federal financial support, right? So when we have something like sequestration, where every agency has to lose, you know, 5% of its budget or whatever, well, a lot of that's going to, it's going to knock on to exactly those, those young researchers. It's really unfortunate, both in terms of the talent and the discouraged talent that we've, that we may have had over the past decade, as well as just the, you know, the discoveries that we've forgone that may have been helpful in any number of addressing any

number of the national challenges that we've got today. Yeah, I mean, there's an ethical aspect to science funding, I believe, where if you accept the idea, I guess, that science leads to ultimately a bettering of human condition, whether through medicine or through technology, or just through the pleasure of understanding the natural world in which we live, to lose or to underfund this endeavor, I think it actually has ethical implications to the nation and humanity at large. And I think it's kind of painful reading your article for that reason. But also, I think you provided like we can, it doesn't have to stay that way, we can grow back to where we were. And I think you said that the rate we'd have to start to grow

is roughly nine and a half percent. Is that right per year? That's right. Yeah, starting where we are and getting back to that, you know, where that original trend line would have gotten us would yes, take about nine and a half percent a year. And again, the trend line is 5.7%. That's the trend line that I use, and that's the historical average. So basically, to me, a great kind of scenario would be spending at that 9.5% annual increase clip over the next five years, get us back to the historical trend line. And then once we've hit reset in a sense, then see how much we can the historical trend line. And then, you know, kind of once we've hit reset in that, you know, in a sense, then see how much we can beat that trend line by, right?

Like, I don't know that we have to spend, increase spending 9.5% a year forever. You know, that is a fair bit of money. But at the very least, yeah, getting us back to that original trend line, I think would be certainly worthwhile for the reasons we've talked about. And then, but, you know, but then once we're there, let's also still figure out how we can beat that historical trend line, you know, to meet these, meet these challenges.

I was trying to do kind of back of the envelope calculations. Like the last, the most recent COVID bailout bill that we just passed probably spent more than the NSF has ever spent in its history. Like combined, right? Like I think easily. I think it's roughly. Yeah, $900 billion was the most recent one.

And the NSF budget today is $8 billion a year. So they've been around for, what, 70 years. Easily beats that. So I think we got the money. I think that's always the point that I try to make. We have the money. Science is not the driver of the debt, nor the way to solve it exactly uh exactly so as we wind down here and i encourage everyone i'll again link to your article it's on well it might be one way to let me let me tweak what you just said it's

sure it it might be one of the ways to solve it if we can drive it new innovations that create new industries yeah you know and address address, you know, things like cures for Alzheimer's research, or Alzheimer's disease, I should say, you know, the role that science can play in resolving our debt issues is on its upside, right? Not by cutting it. Yeah, if Tim Berners-Lee had retained some ownership of the World Wide Web Protocol and gifted a portion of that to particle physics, as thanks for developing it. I think, you know, for example, like, we would easily have funded, like paid for itself, right? All

of what we've ever existed in particle physics, like if we try to think about things in that way. I think there's a lot of promise. And I hope, you know, it's one of the things that we focus on the space side, but just more investment in science and R&D. That's what I'm kind of saying earlier that I don't think there's ever been a point where we can honestly say we've regretted that as a nation or anyone, any nation who invests in it. Like no one says that was a waste of money because it just fundamentally, even if you don't get a result you're looking for, you've paid people to pursue the scientific process, which is inherently a good process to support and the

people doing it. Well, we're wrapping up here. I wanted to ask, what has kind of changed in your mental model? Or what have you had to change, you know, as you've done this? Or have you had to change any things about how you understand how this works and why it works? Or have you had any pre-existing beliefs that you've had to revise based on the process of politics or doing this on a day-to-day

basis? I'd been in, you know, already been in DC for several years when I came to AAAS. And I wasn't working on the budget, but I, you know, but I watched that process unfold. And I don't know, I feel like I had a pretty good, I mean, it wasn't like I was particularly starry-eyed about how all this stuff gets done. Mr. Smith comes to Washington, you win. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Do you have any, like, misunderstandings, public misconceptions that are really frustratingly persistent, in your opinion, about how the process of budget and science policy works? Something that really irritates you in terms of what you see people saying on the internet, for example. Yeah, yeah. So let me think about this. There's a wealth of answers I could give you when it comes to the budget. I mean, there's two things I'd point to that sort of kind of

bug me a little bit. I understand the reasons why people hold these ideas completely, but they're pretty, but they still get to me. But so one idea is the idea of the collapsing federal R&D budget overall, right? The disinvestment. That's a word that I've heard used many times, the idea of disinvestment or collapsing R&D. And pursuing that argument, pointing to some of the trend lines we've talked about, right? The idea that federal R&D was much higher in the space race and it's lower that now, it's collapsed. And that's all true, but the biggest driver, I mean, I think the issue for me is that the biggest driver of decline for federal R&D relative to GDP is not basic science, right? Federal funding for basic science actually peaked as a share of the

economy in, I believe, 2003 or 2004. There was a bit of a decline in the early 80s, I believe, but for the most part, federal basic science has grown. When people point to the decline in federal R&D, that's actually driven by development. And a lot of that is, to bring it all the way back to how we started, declining spending for defense technology. A lot of the Cold War technology acquisition that DOD used to do, they don't do it anymore at the same scale. So the biggest declines in federal R&D, it's not the R, it's the D. But people that care about the R don't seem to recognize that what was lost from like the 1970s is not the same thing as what many advocates are advocating for today, right? The kind of, you know, basic research, applied research, innovative, you know, radical, you know, transformational technology type things. A lot of it, again, is on the defense side. So that's

sort of one just pet peeve. I just think it's a, I think it's sometimes it's, basically people point to that declining R&D and they call it basic science. It's not basic science. And, you know, I think it's just kind of people mislabeling or misusing the data and the trends in ways they shouldn't, in ways they should know better. So that's one. It's complete. That's a complete like budget walk pet peeve. So, you know, I'm probably the only one on the planet who feels that way. Then the other thing is just simply the fact there is a notion that Congress doesn't like research, doesn't like science, hates funding science. And I think, I hope that, you know, over the course of this conversation, we've sort of illuminated why that's not really true. And

actually Congress does often go to bat and many legislators go to bat for various parts of the research enterprise. And the fact that, number one, non-defense R&D has been fairly stable within the non-defense budget, number one. And then number two, within that non-defense R&D budget, certain agencies like NIH, NSF, have actually done better than others and many other non-science agencies, hopefully is a, you know, is a testament to the fact that actually there is still a lot of support and a lot of bipartisan support in the Congress for funding R&D. And I think the experience, the experience of the Trump years should, you know, offer some additional evidence for that,

right? And we just are coming off an administration that for four years tried their best to really gut big, big parts of the federal R&D enterprise. And Congress had none of it. Energy R&D, defense R&D, veterans medical research, NIH and NASA and others, a lot of them did very, very well in the Trump years, in spite of what the Trump administration wanted. And that was true, whether Democrats are running Congress or Republicans are running Congress. To be honest, I don't think Congress gets enough credit for trying to do what they can to take care of the research enterprise. It's never perfect, and it's never as much as anybody would like, but they actually do try their best to ensure a level of research competitiveness. And I think they do deserve some credit for that. Good hot take to end this discussion on.

Matt Horhan is the director of the R&D Budget and Policy Program at the American Association for the Advancement of Science. Matt, thank you for having such a great wonky conversation about federal R&D budgets. It was great. I hope to have you back on sometime in the future. conversation about federal R&D budgets. It was great. I hope to have you back on sometime in the future. For sure. Thanks for having me. This was fun. Planetary Society Chief Advocate Casey Dreyer and his guest on this month's Space Policy

Edition, Matt Houraghan. Casey, any closing comments or thoughts about that interview? Well, if you like what Matt and I were talking about, you can find a lot of his work on the AAAS.org slash RD website. We'll link to that in our show notes. And he's on Twitter at Matt Horahan. You can find occasional commentaries on budget and policy analysis there. Casey, I think we can leave it at that. I will just say that I look forward to seeing you and hopefully lots and lots of other people. The ticket sales are going well at PlanetFest21. Again, find out more about that, including Casey's session.

And I'm hosting a few at planetary.org slash PlanetFest21. You might want to become a member. Get a break on your registration for PlanetFest, planetary.org slash membership. Casey, always a pleasure. And I look forward to catching up with you. I hope that we can talk maybe before the March Space Policy Edition. And you can fill us in a little bit on the weekly Planetary Radio about those recommendations that are about to go to the Biden administration. Happy to do so, Matt. And hopefully next episode, we'll start by celebrating a successful landing of Perseverance.

Oh, man. I know we all wish for that. Casey, thanks again very much. And I will see you soon. See you, Matt. That's Casey Dreyer, Senior Space Policy Advisor and Chief Advocate for the Planetary Society.

I'm Matt Kaplan. I hope you will join us for the next weekly Planetary Radio, and I will be talking with Mark Hartsman. It's a great lead-in to Perseverance, Arriving at Mars, along with Hope and Tianwen One. Mark has written a book called The Big Book of Mars. It is great fun, and I expect it'll be just as fun a conversation. For all of you out there, look forward to joining you again in March for the next Space Policy Edition. Stay well and go Perseverance.