Singled out

By R.D.N.

TOM COBURN, the junior senator from Oklahoma, doesn’t like the idea of paying for political-science research with federal cash. Last week Mr Coburnintroduced an amendment to the continuing resolution that would've blocked the National Science Foundation (NSF) from funding such research. He even sent a letter to the NSF exhorting it to reconsider its "political science" grants. He used the scare quotes, presumably to indicate that he doubts political science is a real discipline. He'd rather see most of the around $10m that would have gone to political scientists be sent instead to the National Cancer Institute.

The government shouldn’t waste tax dollars on anything that isn’t worthwhile, but $10m is a trivial amount of money by the standards of the federal budget. It isn’t even much compared to the $5 billion already budgeted for the National Cancer Institute. It is, however, an enormous portion of the funding for political-science research in America. The NSF estimates that its cash pays for 61% of basic research in the social sciences.

The cuts recommended by Mr Coburn would therefore be devastating to the field of political science. Not surprisingly, political scientists are up in arms. Mr Coburn has argued that their research won’t save lives or improve the country’s competitiveness, to which the American Political Science Association has responded:

Political science research addresses questions that are fundamental to our national interest. Political science is the only discipline devoted to learning how to make democracies work better. Political science scholarship is critical to advancing national security, indeed the NSF political science program was invited by the Department of Defense to conduct scholarship deemed essential to understanding terrorism and global threats. Political science research furthers our understanding of how to develop public policies that effectively and efficiently respond to natural disasters, health care delivery, global human rights, and the other challenges we face.

That seems like pretty good value for $10m. Mr Coburn's measure has been modified to allow exceptions for research that the NSF director certifies would promote "the national security or economic interests of the United States." That makes it more reasonable. But it would still force political-science research to clear a bar that no other type of research must.

Mr Coburn argues that universities should fund the research out of their own pockets. When Jeff Flake, a Senator from Arizona, tried to cut off funding last year, he pointed out that most NSF grants in political science went to universities with endowments of $1 billion or more. But if you think of federal funding as the government buying useful research, as opposed to using research grants as academic welfare, endowment size is incidental. Most of the biggest grants in just about every field go to institutions with large endowments for the simple reason that they are best equipped to carry out research. Money spent at Harvard, with its multi-billion-dollar endowment, is money well spent if it produces studies valued by the government.

The real debate seems to be over what is of value. For many Republicans the answer is nothing having to do with political science. Yet it is hard to see how that discipline is any more frivolous than—or even all that different from—economics, sociology or anthropology. Mr Coburn's measure wouldn’t touch NSF funding for other social sciences. But this is the fourth time since 2006 a Republican has singled out political science for cuts.

If we look closer at those efforts, the picture becomes a bit clearer. Mr Coburn, for example, has particularly objected to studies on American attitudes to the filibuster, at a time when Republicans are using the filibuster routinely. Mr Flake had likewise complained about research on climate-change negotiations. When Mr Coburn first proposed cutting off funding in 2009, he complained that NSF money had gone to fund The Human Rights Data Project, which, he noted, had “concluded that the United States has been ‘increasingly willing to torture enemy combatants and imprison suspected terrorists,’ leading to a worldwide increase in ‘human rights violations’ as others followed-suit.” Mr Coburn even groused that Paul Krugman had received NSF grants more than 15 years earlier. Presumably that was because Mr Krugman went on to become a liberal columnist and not because the research won him a Nobel prize.

In all of these cases, the research risked calling into question the wisdom of policies supported by the Republican Party. In none of the cases did Republicans argue that the studies were flawed. They appeared to simply object to financing research that might contradict their point of view.

That’s short-sighted. Research into the effectiveness of American policies can only improve them. Going after researchers is a way of shooting the messenger. Of course, not every project that the NSF funds is going to be worthwhile (Mr Coburn has cited a few that do seem wacky). But that’s true of every field of study. The NSF’s peer-review process is quite rigorous. Some 80% of all grant proposals in political science are declined. The ones that get through are actually quite valuable, as Mr Coburn himself has discovered.