Most people are demoted for poor performance. Dr. John H. Marburger, President Bush's newly confirmed science adviser, was kicked down a notch before he even started his job. For over a decade, the national science adviser--who heads the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP)--has been a near-cabinet-level position. Officially, the designation is "Assistant to the President." Condoleezza Rice, Bush's national-security adviser, holds that rank; as chief of staff during the Ford administration, so did Dick Cheney. But Marburger, the former head of the Department of Energy's Brookhaven National Laboratory, concedes "That title was never offered to me." (A recent executive order calls him merely a "Federal Government official.") D. Allan Bromley, the Yale nuclear physicist who served as the presidential science adviser to Bush's father, takes a dark view of this turn of events. The administration, he says, has simply decided that "they don't need that level of scientific input."
Another former OSTP director, Neal Lane, worries that the downgrading ofMarburger's position may impede his access to the president--though Marburgersays that he hasn't had any problems getting his views across to top policymakers. Still, in light of today's circumstances, the decision by Bush and hishandlers to put their science adviser in the outer orbit of the White House is anodd one. Even setting aside the central role of scientific and technologicaladvances in spurring economic growth (a key refrain of Federal Reserve ChairmanAlan Greenspan's and no small matter in a recession), the biological and nuclearthreats posed by terrorism call for exactly the sort of timely and objectivescience advice that Marburger, by all accounts, is ideally equipped to provide.
War--the cold one--brought scientists into the WhiteHouse. In the atmosphereof national paranoia surrounding the successful launch of Sputnik in 1957,President Dwight D. Eisenhower and his science adviser James Killian, a formerMIT president, quickly responded by founding a star-studded group known as PSAC:the President's Science Advisory Committee. It was the "apogee of presidentialscience advising," says the Yale science historian Daniel Kevles, and itcontinued into the Nixon years.
The Vietnam War, however, drove a wedge between academic scientists and thosein power. In 1973, Nixon, distrustful of the peacenik PSAC members who opposedthe administration line on the antiballistic-missile system, abolished both thecommittee and the position of presidential science adviser. "Nixon's people said,'We're not going to invite these vipers into the nest,'" observes Gregg Herken,author of Cardinal Choices, a 1992 history of presidential science advising.
It appears that the George W. Bush administration may be following the Nixonmodel very closely. At first, it looked as though there wouldn't even be ascience adviser: Before Marburger's confirmation on October 23, rumors circulatedthat Bush would be dismantling OSTP. Then there were delays in naming an adviser.Marburger's first moves at OSTP have further deepened scientists' concerns--andeven spawned some conspiracy theories ("Why would he reduce his own influence?"critics ask). Though previous OSTP heads have had four Senate-confirmed associatedirectors, Marburger says that he'll appoint just two: one for science and onefor technology. This rules out an associate director for national security andinternational affairs, thus severing OSTP's traditional link to the NationalSecurity Council just as the nation goes to war. But Marburger counters, inconfident Bush-speak, that he's working in a more streamlined, business-styleWhite House, and that's why he wants fewer associate directors. "I felt therewere too many of them," he says, "and that they were somewhat stovepiped."
Still more alarming is Marburger's selection of Richard Russell, the WhiteHouse's transition chief of staff for OSTP, to serve as associate director fortechnology. Previous associate directors have typically held doctorates and topuniversity positions. Bromley's life-sciences director, for example, was DonaldA. Henderson, former dean of the Johns Hopkins School of Public Health and theman credited with the eradication of smallpox. Russell, by contrast, worked as astaffer on the House Science Committee under the partisan Republican F. JamesSensenbrenner; he has a bachelor's degree in biology.
Marburger says that he certainly respects advanced degrees but feels they're"not essential for policy work in all cases." Still, many scientists are stunned."The question, everyone thought, was would Marburger keep this guy as his chiefof staff or not--never dreaming that he would become one of the top twoscientists heading OSTP," says one longtime leader in science policy circles. AndJohn Holdren, director of the Program on Science, Technology, and Public Policyat Harvard University's Kennedy School of Government, calls Russell's appointment"just ridiculous." He continues: "I find it inexplicable that we have a nomineewho has no qualifications in technology whatsoever. None. Zero. Zip."
As with the Nixon administration, the Bush team attimes seems inclined toregard scientists--whose obsession with facts sometimes prompts them to criticizepartisan policies--as vipers. Throughout the 1990s, after all, it's hard topinpoint a scientific issue that wasn't also a partisan one. Right-wingRepublicans, with their pro-life and anti-evolution constituencies, have oftenseemed antagonistic to the very process of science itself. A telltale momentcame when former House Speaker Newt Gingrich and his cohorts elected, under the"Contract with America," to dismantle the congressional Office of TechnologyAssessment (OTA), the agency some called our "national defense against the dumb."Since 1972, OTA--Congress's version of the Office of Science and TechnologyPolicy--produced scores of highly respected reports on issues ranging from energypolicy to bioethics. According to John Gibbons, who directed OTA before coming onas Bill Clinton's science adviser, there's a growing feeling in Congress that theoffice simply must be reinstated.
Before John Marburger had even been chosen, the first five to six months ofthe Bush administration saw the partisan polarization of several scientificissues: missile defense (evocative, given the Nixon example), energy policy, stemcell research, and global warming. Particularly in the latter case, the Bush teamwas wary of vipers.
As acting director of OSTP during the first nine months of the Bushadministration, Rosina Bierbaum, a climate-science expert and former associatedirector for environment under Clinton, briefed a few cabinet-level officials onthe current data and theories relating to global warming. But Bierbaum--now deanof the School of Natural Resources and Environment at the University ofMichigan--says that "the scientists [who] knew the most about climate change atOSTP were not allowed to participate" in deliberations on the issue within theWhite House inner circle. The Bush administration, you may recall, wassubsequently broadsided by a National Academy of Sciences report that undercuttheir official line on climate change--a study that the administration itself hadcommissioned. And if the president's team was mad at the scientific communityafter that embarrassment, scientists were equally outraged by Bush's proposedscience budget--developed long before Marburger came on board--whichsubstantially cut virtually all federal research-and-development programs exceptthose associated with the National Institutes of Health (NIH) or defense.
In this context, Marburger's July declaration that he was a lifelong Democratmay not have been a particularly canny political move. When the Bushadministration's views on key issues stand outside the scientific mainstream,they've shown signs of a willingness to shoot the messenger.
Bioterrorism could change this. So far it's not apartisan issue (although inSeptember, the same could have been said of airport security). And Marburger'sOSTP has been working closely to provide "science coordination service" for TomRidge's Office of Homeland Security. Newsweek recently reported that when faced with contradictory interpretations of whether certain anthrax spores had been "weaponized," Ridge picked up the phone and yelled, "I need scientists!" Marburger says he was on the other end of the line.
Marburger would have been of use sooner--an authoritative presence toaccompany the soothing words of Surgeon General David Satcher and NIH specialistAnthony Fauci. Ridge had previously insisted that the anthrax sent to Senator TomDaschle's office was not "weaponized" and then had been forced to change hisposition--the type of flub that institutionalized science advice should be ableto prevent. Marburger might also have been able to avert Department of Healthand Human Services Secretary Tommy Thompson's embarrassing public assertion thatthe first inhalation-anthrax victim may have contracted the disease by drinkingfrom a stream. "There have been many statements in recent days and weeks thatwould have benefited from a more complete knowledge of the underlying science,"says Bromley. Neal Lane, now a professor at Rice University, agrees: "You needmore than ever to have someone close in, advising the president and his other keyaides on matters like anthrax."
But geographically speaking, at least, Marburger's proximity seems anythingbut assured. As war began in Afghanistan, OSTP, along with several other offices,was evacuated from the White House's Eisenhower Executive Office Building. Now noone, including Marburger, seems to know when--or if--OSTP will be moving back.When asked to confirm that the Office of Homeland Security had taken over the oldOSTP office, Marburger responded: "That's not entirely true. . . . The fact is thatit's pretty empty." John Holdren of Harvard, for one, sees the move as almostanother nail in the coffin for Marburger. Never mind penetrating the Oval Office:"The question is, will he have the right kind of badge to walk into the West Wingwithout an escort?"
