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University Responsibilities and Academic Earmarks

In yesterday’s Daily Camera (our local newspaper here in Boulder) Todd Neff had a good article on a complicated subject – academic earmarks. Earmarks are directed spending by members of Congress to their district. Earmarks are typically not a large amount when compared to the discretionary budget, but they have been growing in recent years and have caught the attention of a number of members of Congress. Historically, earmarks have been an acceptable and important mechanism for members of Congress to “bring home the bacon” to their districts. Earmarks have to be taken out of existing programs, and thus represent a reshuffling of spending priorities from that originally authorized by Congress. For some programs, like those related to transportation, earmarking is expected and fairly typical (although there are exceptions).

“Academic” earmarks refer to directed spending on research and development programs. Many researchers oppose such earmarks because they circumvent most institutional mechanisms of peer review and thus place politics above merit. In addition, academic earmarks can materially affect the performance of government research programs if the money for the earmark comes from an existing research program. From the perspective of a government program manager, an academic earmark looks very much like an unexpected budget cut. None of this is to say that good work can’t be done under an earmark, only that it introduces a very different mechanism for resource allocation than a merit-based, strategic-focused approach that is difficult enough under ordinary circumstances.

Back to Boulder. It turns out that some of the budgets of NOAA labs here in Boulder are being earmarked, effectively resulting in cuts to programs core to the NOAA mission. In the Daily Camera article I am quoted suggesting that universities need to take a greater role in policing academic earmarks, or else they should not be surprised when in some situation scientific excellence is subsumed to jobs and money. Here is an excerpt:

A 50 percent budget cut is delaying upgrades for supercomputers for modeling hurricanes and improving storm prediction.

An effort to understand how much of the greenhouse gas carbon dioxide the United States generates is limping along because of a 30 percent cut.

The sole U.S. civilian laboratory dedicated to monitoring and predicting solar storms, which can knock out communications satellites and trigger power blackouts, is running on 44 percent less money than in 2005.

With the war in Iraq costing more than $4.5 billion a month and entitlements such as Medicare and Social Security on the rise, times are tough for federal "discretionary" programs, which include everything from scientific research to the FBI.

But several National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration initiatives in Boulder are less victims of shrinking budgets than of political horse-trading that increasingly threatens the long-term health of strategic U.S. science programs, some scientists and policy-makers say.

Some of the nation's core climate-research efforts, based in Boulder, have seen their budgets cut an average of 15 percent this year, lab officials say. That's far more than the 8.2 percent drop in NOAA's overall research budget, which fell from about $414 million in 2005 to $380 million this year.

Earmarking science

Earmarking, known technically as "directed spending" and sometimes derisively as "pork," has been around since the earliest days of the republic. It involves legislators directing specific projects to their districts without giving the responsible federal agencies a say.

In its "2006 Congressional Pig Book," released last week, the nonprofit, nonpartisan Citizens Against Government Waste reported 9,964 earmarks it regards as pork, worth $29 billion this year. That's up from 958 such earmarks worth $12.5 billion in 1996.

"If you're generating earmarks for districts directed into projects and the investment is well-supported, that's the way Congress has operated for 200 years," said U.S. Rep. Mark Udall, D-Eldorado Springs.

Mark Udall represents Boulder as well. Here is another excerpt which describes the effects of earmarks on the NOAA labs in Boulder:

The Bush administration and both the House and Senate versions of spending bills requested $13 million for NOAA's High Performance Computing & Communications office. The budget ended up being halved compared to last year's.

The cut happened in a conference committee in November, where a cadre of senators and House members hashed out differences in the legislative bodies' separate bills. A 212-page conference report then went to the House and Senate for an up-or-down vote. There was no explanation for the cut.

"It was killed in conference, which is very tough to deal with," said Alexander "Sandy" MacDonald, acting director of NOAA's Earth Systems Research Laboratory in Boulder, which oversees six NOAA atmospheric research divisions.

The Boulder supercomputers are key tools in improving forecasters' ability to predict weather in general, and severe storms and hurricanes in particular. The cuts came less than three months after Hurricane Katrina ravaged the Gulf Coast.

MacDonald said NOAA has delayed an upgrade of the supercomputers for nine months and hopes the same cuts don't happen again in 2007.

The same conference report channeled $10.3 million in earmarks to nine programs, money that would otherwise go straight to NOAA.

The conference report offers little hint of what those nine earmarks mean and no mention of their legislative sponsors. One line item, for $1 million, says simply: "Univ of AL Huntsville Climate Research." Another, also for $1 million, reads: "Drought Research Study."

University of Alabama at Huntsville professor John Christy said the climate research involves installing weather stations that will report hourly weather information throughout Alabama.

They relate to the study of climate, generally a long-term affair, in that the stations will provide such information for decades, he said.

Christy said the drought study would assess how irrigation could boost corn production in a state that must import from the Midwest 95 percent of the grain consumed by its 1 billion chickens.

"My feeling is that we were provided with this funding because we were going to make a tremendous contribution to the state of Alabama with it," Christy said.

Such projects are a rounding error compared to earmarks at NASA, which totaled $271 million. But they had a big impact in Boulder. James Butler, deputy director of NOAA's Global Monitoring Division here, said his division's budget is down an average of 15 percent this year.

Among its activities, the lab monitors carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases that scientists believe are causing global warming. The division's Carbon Cycle Greenhouse Gases group, the world's foremost monitor of global carbon-dioxide levels for a half-century, saw its budget slashed 30 percent.

Butler said among the programs the group is paring back is a network of sensors on radio towers and in small aircraft to study how much carbon dioxide land and vegetation absorbs versus how much the nation's collective smokestacks and tailpipes emit.

"This is critical. If we're going to learn about how we're increasing carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, we need to know this," Butler said.

NOAA's Chemical Sciences Division in Boulder also faces a 15 percent budget cut, said scientist Richard Lataitis. He said a program focusing on California's torrential rains to connect weather and climate phenomena was cut from $450,000 to about $50,000.

NOAA's Space Environment Center saw its budget drop from $7.2 million to $4 million in the congressional conference report, said Ron Zwickl, the center's acting director. The center monitors and develops systems to forecast solar storms that can wreak havoc with satellite communications and electric utilities.

He said the center is coping without layoffs this year but that another year of such cuts would be "nearly fatal."

Given that earmarking is an established practice in Congress, is there really a problem here? And, if so, what might be done? The Daily Camera article offers some perspectives on these questions, starting with a frank admission from Congressman Udall about the political realities of earmarking.

Given the political realities of Congress, Udall said complaining about earmarks is a sensitive issue: "How do I do it in such a way that there's no retaliation in the next budget cycle?" Udall asked.

He said the earmarking process needs structural change to make the decisions less personal, more transparent in terms of their purpose and their congressional sponsor, and subject to an individual vote on their own merits.

The lobbying reform bill the Senate passed 90-8 on March 29 addresses earmarks. The bill does require that "the essential governmental purpose for the earmark" and the name of the legislator backing it be published at least 24 hours before a vote on conference reports.

"It's better than nothing," Udall said.

CU's Pielke said universities should also take action against certain earmarking. He cited the University of Michigan as an example of an institution with strict policies that limit earmarking.

"I don't see Congress necessarily making a distinction between a science project and a road project," Pielke said. "So it's up to the universities on this issue."

On a Web page explaining its policy, Michigan officials say scientific earmarking "wastes taxpayer money and slows the scientific progress that would be made if the same sums were allocated on a merit basis."

"It's something I've pushed at the University of Colorado," Pielke said. "It hasn't gotten legs so far."

From where I sit universities, and perhaps university associations like the American Association of Universities, should consider developing guidelines for earmarking. Specifically, under what circumstances will a university pursue an earmark? What federal programs are appropriate targets for an earmark? What projects should be pursued? What process goes on within the university to determine which faculty member’s project gets put forward for an earmark? From my experience, such questions are uncomfortable at best for universities to debate and discuss.

I sit on the Federal Relations Advisory Committee for the University of Colorado, where we discuss earmarks a lot, and it seems to me that most faculty members are nervous about earmarking, unless it is their pet project being earmarked. It also seems that university administrators have no problem with earmarking, typically arguing that “everyone else is doing it, so we don’t want to be left out.” Of course the reality is that earmarking is never a large amount of resources when compared to the institution’s overall research funding.

What might be done? One model might be the University of Michigan, which has adopted a policy on earmarking. It states:

The University of Michigan supports scientific peer review as the primary and best mechanism to allocate Federal research funds. Accordingly, it is the general practice of the University not to seek and/or accept Congressionally directed or "earmarked" funds.

The Michigan policy does allow for earmarking under certain situations:

In rare instances, the University may choose to undertake efforts to secure directed funding from Congress. Exceptions to the University anti-earmarking policy should be made only when agreed upon by the Vice President for Research, in consultation with the Vice President for Government Relations, the Provost, the University federal relations staff and other executive officers, as deemed appropriate, and with approval of the President. Such exceptions should be limited and made only when based on the considerations listed below and the proposed initiative is so meritorious that the responsible course is to proceed.

The whole policy can be found here.

It seems to me that a leading research university, like Michigan or Colorado, should eschew academic earmarks in general. These universities are so successful in raising research support through traditional means that earmarking smacks of a bit of greed. Further, the negative effects on the R&D enterprise, as illustrated by the effects on the NOAA budget, are far greater than whatever benefits result from the redirected funds. I’ve suggested to our Federal Relations Advisory Committee that we adopt a policy like the Michigan policy; so far, it hasn’t received much support, though I haven’t pushed on this nearly as hard as I could.