WASHINGTON — Irrespective of who becomes the next President of the United States, he or she should name a science advisor right away in order to make sure that sound science is reflected throughout the next Administration’s policies, several scholars stressed Wednesday.
“It’s not just another government appointment,” said Rush Holt, chief executive officer at the American Association for the Advancement of Science and a former U.S. congressman from New Jersey.
“Science and technology are indeed the engine for development and growth here in this country and around the world, and it very much affects the quality of Americans,” Holt said.
Holt said the appointment of the next director of the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy, or OSTP, should not be seen as a mere “figurehead” position for science and technology. Rather, he said, the position should be seen as one who heads an agency that cuts across federal agencies and touches on a variety of other pressing issues that are not necessarily seen as science, such as justice, diplomacy and social welfare.
Deborah Wince-Smith, president and CEO of the U.S. Council on Competitiveness and an assistant director of OSTP under President Ronald Reagan, said: “The OSTP has a pivotal role to play in not just coordinating and creating the policies and objectives of our government’s role in all these issues but also going out and galvanizing the private sector to come together in really large scale public-private partnerships to advance these issues because the government alone cannot do these things.”
From biometrics to gene editing, Wince-Smith said, “all of that comes together in a perfect storm of opportunity and there’s no place in government — with the exception of OSPT — that can look at all those things in a cross-cutting way and work with other agencies to figure out what are our priorities and how do we accelerate that on large scale.”
As a practical example as to why an early appointment of an OSPT director is crucial, Holt noted that when President Barack Obama was putting together the $800 billion stimulus bill of 2009 early in his presidency, it included $21.5 billion for science and research spending thanks to recommendations that came by way of current OSTP director John P. Holdren.
