US needs department of technology & science policy

[Dan_Eastwood]

Opinion from Nature.com

Unlike most other advanced economies, the United States has typically relied on a diversity of decentralized federal science agencies to design and conduct the government’s research programmes. With funding decisions made by several congressional committees and with minimal oversight from the Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP) in the White House, this approach has been enormously successful.

As former directors of one of those science agencies, the National Institutes of Health (NIH), we remain fans of our distributed federal system. It encourages a broad base of support for the sciences in Congress, and it protects basic research from partisan politics and from narrowly managed planning processes. It has fostered US leadership in scientific discovery since the Second World War.

Yet we have come to realize that the country needs an additional mechanism to promote national and global goals: a Department of Technology and Science Policy (DTSP), the leader of which would join other department heads and administration leaders to form the president’s Cabinet.

continues at Nature.com

https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-021-03543-x