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83   Budget Bureau Decisions
     Enter the Public Arena
     The Washington Post   Saturday, February 3, 1968

     During the last year, the bureau of the budget's organization and
personnel have received unprecedented public notice.  Its leaders have
lectured and written in some detail about their philosophy of planning.

     This is a healthy innovation, for it exposes to public criticism 
some of our society's most crucial decision-making -- decision making
that is labeled as mere staff advice to the president.

     The new open policy must be the result of a conscious choice, 
perhaps only a reaction to mounting criticism of the obscurity that has
cloaked the final process of bringing the executive program into 
harmony.  (The development of an invisible bureaucracy of confidential
advisers to the President is one of the predictable paradoxes of 
democratic political life, however, and responsibility for crucial 
advice may now simply shift to some other more informal and anonymous 
group.)

     The bureau of the Budget's roles in interpreting needs and goals
in science and technology are among the most difficult, because of the
very appeal of science to rational judgment.

     In the words of Assistant Director William D. Carey "public 
opinion today expects government to make its decisions and choices by a
more rational process than simple reliance on good intentions and
sloppy altruism.  Giving the plurality of national goals to which we
are committed in one degree or another, the budget is an exercise for
relating resources to priorities with a semblance of rationality and
relative justice."

     In an article in science magazine, Carey also remarks wisely that
"our definition of investment has come to include the field of human
resources... investment in education is more than socially "good"; it
is economically productive.  These investments can no longer be scorned
as handouts by soft-headed social reformers."  Many educators have  
taken this idea for granted for so long that we may forget how 
recently, and perhaps how narrowly, it has been publicly considered.

     There are, however, disturbing signs that the widely advocated 
extension to research of program-budgeting analysis needs a cost-
benefit analysis of its own.  The pluralism of U.S. science policies and
the strong commitment to basic research are difficult to rationalize,
explain and defend except for the unparalleled vigor of our scientific
and technological position in the world.

     Inevitable, the criticism of U.S. science in a recently announced
study by the European Organization for Economic Cooperation and 
Development (OECD) were quoted more emphatically in the press than the 
plaudits.  In  evaluating these criticisms, we have to remember that
their authors have loudly lamented the technological gap and the brain
drain problems which are unassailable testimony to the high U.S. 
standing in scientific economy and culture.

     Some of Carey's recent speculations on how to rationalize the R&D
budget are reported in the January 1968 issue of Industrial Research
magazine.  He proposes a "social merit matrix," which seeks to give an
objective score to competing research programs.  Three value categories
are assumed to have equal weight: economic, cultural and geopolitical.

     When the matrix is applied, we then find that population control
scores 21; lunar exploration 37 and oceanography 52.  Is this an 
unconscious parody of rational decision-making?

     There are few world problems more objectively and gravely 
documented than the need to keep population growth in pace with 
agricultural and industrial development.

     Tactical flaws in our science policies are as numerous as in any
other important endeavor.  But before we overturn the system to make
it conform to some absolute standards of merit, we ought to be sure
we are substituting something pragmatically better.

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