Much of the nation’s science establishment breathed a sigh of relief when, just before taking office, President Obama named physicist John P. Holdren to be his top science advisor.
After eight years of the Bush administration, which was widely accused of subordinating hard scientific facts to the whims of politics, Holdren was seen as someone who would make things right.
"Holdren's appointment [is] a stark contrast to what we've seen over the last eight years," said Kevin Knobloch, president of the Union of Concerned Scientists, after word of Holdren’s appointment leaked out after Obama’s election. "He is knowledgeable about the greatest threats facing our nation and the world—global warming, energy insecurity, and nuclear weapons proliferation—and has deep expertise in both science and public policy."
During the Bush years, UCS surveyed scientists at nine federal agencies and a significant percentage of them reported that scientific information had been routinely distorted or suppressed when it did not support the administration's point of view.
Give that recent history, UCS and others hailed the appointment of Holdren and other top scientists in the Obama administration as “ a dramatic shift” in the federal government's willingness to consider only the best available science when formulating policy.
It is a point of view that Obama heartily endorsed. He made a rare mention of science during his inaugural address, promising to "restore science to its rightful place.”
Nearly a year and half into his term, Obama has kept his promise with an ambitious science agenda. All of this has implications for Holdren, who directs the 70-person Office of Science and Technology Policy. The office is responsible for informing the president of the scientific and technological implications of a wide range of issues, from climate change to nuclear disarmament.
The office has its roots in the administration of former president John F. Kennedy, who founded the office to offer recommendation in response to the space race with the Soviet Union.
The office became congressionally chartered in 1976, and was given the task of advising the president on the implications of science and technology on domestic and international affairs. The law that established the office also authorized the science advisor to to lead government-wide efforts to develop science and technology policies.
Before coming to the Obama administration, Holdren, 66, taught at some of the nation’s top research institutions. He was at the center of some of the most contentious and politically charged scientific debates, including climate change and environmental policy. He also briefed Obama on climate and energy issues during the presidential campaign.
Holdren served on the Harvard University faculty as the Teresa and John Heinz Professor of Environmental Policy. He was also director of the Woods Hole Research Institute in Falmouth, Mass. Previously, he worked for years on the faculty at the University of California, Berkeley, where he remains a professor emeritus.
During his confirmation hearing, Holdren came under fire for his previous predictions, including his unfounded predictions about what he saw as the devastating impact of climate change. In the 1980s, he said that famine due to climate could leave a billion people dead by 2020. Holdren was forced to back away from that assertion during his confirmation hearing.
''I think it is unlikely to happen,'' he told the senators.
Still, Holdren sailed to confirmation. And in the nearly year and half his administration has been in office, Obama has dramatically increased the nation’s investment in science and technology, a down-payment on his promise to double such investment in three key science agencies—the National Science Foundation, the Department of Energy’s Office of Science, and the National Institute of Standards and Technology’s laboratories—and to increase overall spending on research and development to fully three percent of the nation’s GDP.
All of which falls under Holdren’s purview and he granted an interview with USBE to talk about those and other issues.
The conversation follows here:
USBE: Why are the engineering schools at historically black colleges important to the country?
Dr. Holdren: One of the implications of this administration’s recognition that innovation is an essential ingredient to our economic recovery and future success is that we need a more diverse pool of people entering the science and engineering workforce. A diversity of people, with a diversity of backgrounds, helps assure a diversity of ideas. And ideas are the genesis of all innovation.
Historically black colleges and universities are helping in this regard. Some two-dozen HBCUs in the United States have engineering schools, from which about 700 African Americans earn bachelor's degrees in engineering each year. In addition, five HBCUs award PhDs in engineering, producing about 30 African American engineering doctorates each year.
USBE: Where would the country be without them, when it comes to preparing African American engineers?
Dr. Holdren: Clearly the nation would be worse off without this added tributary of excellence for the engineering workforce. As I mentioned earlier, Department of Education statistics indicate that a greater percentage of African American students in HBCUs select engineering or science as their major compared to African Americans enrolled in non-HBCUs.
That suggests that when it comes to attracting minority students to these fields in which minorities are traditionally underrepresented, we are much better off as a nation with these schools than we’d be without them.
USBE: Why did you want this job?
Dr. Holdren: I’ve been interested since my student days in how science and technology relate to human well-being. That is how the benefits of science and technology for society can be maximized and how the risks can be minimized. And that involves thinking about the roles of science and technology in the economy, in public health, the energy system, in environmental protection and management, in national and homeland security.
And on the institutional side it involves the educational system, government and private sector support for research and development, and for technology assessment, it involves public policies that favor entrepreneurship and innovation while still managing to protect public goods like the environment.
And basically there is no place that a scientist or engineer interested in that broad set of issues can get as much done that matters than working directly for the president of the United States as his science and technology advisor. I’ve been interested in that whole set of issues my whole adult life so I think I am in the best spot I can possibly be in right now.
USBE: So I take it President Obama did not have to work hard to convince you to take the job?
Dr. Holdren: He did not have to twist my arm.
USBE: How do you describe the role you play for the president and the country?
Dr. Holdren: I have two jobs really. One is to make sure that the president has the understanding he needs of the science and technology aspects of the policy issues on his plate. Everything from the role of science, technology and innovation in job creation to the science and technology of nuclear arms control and non-proliferation. And the other job is to help support and coordinate from the White House the science and technology projects and programs that take place all across the departments and agencies of the federal government.
And to indeed work with the Congress and with state and local government and with the academic, private and non –profit sectors and with other countries to cooperate in pursuit of the president’s priorities for using science and technology to improve people’s lives. In both jobs, I’m supported by the roughly 70-person White House office of Science and Technology Policy, which I direct, and by the president’s council of Advisors on Science and Technology, which I co-chair.
USBE: Do you have any sense of how that differs from the role the office played under President Bush?
Dr. Holdren: I would say in principle the responsibilities were same, but in practice the office under President Bush had a more challenging time carrying those responsibilities out because President Bush was much less interested in and knowledgeable about what science and technology have to contribute than President Obama is. I do admire [the former director] Dr. [John H.] Marburger for all that he managed to get done despite that handicap.
USBE: Was it a lack of understanding or an overabundance of politics that was a factor then?
Dr. Holdren: I have already said that it was all too clear that President Bush and perhaps those closest to him didn’t seem to have much interest in what science and technology had to offer. And so other factors obviously played a larger role. My view is that understanding the relevant science and technology is hugely important to making good policy decisions. But those science and technology understandings are usually never all that have to be taken into account by policy makers.
Scientists and technologists can’t expect that the science and technology facts as they see them are going to dominate decision-making. It is important that that information be available to policy makers. But it is the job of policy makers to take into account people’s values and their preferences about alternative policy approaches that might be used to address a particular issue. So one can’t really complain that in Washington, D.C. politics is involved. Washington, D.C. is about politics. What one wants is to be sure that science and technology are at the table and that the relevant insights from science and technology are taken into account when those decisions are made.
USBE: How frustrating is it when you hear voices on Capitol Hill say, for example, that climate change is a fiction when there is such a scientific consensus on the issue?
Dr. Holdren: It is frustrating. But what that says is that we have to do a better job communicating and educating. This is really about education. Obviously, the science and technology community has not done as good a job as it might have in educating the public and policy makers about any number of important policy issues. We’re just going to have to keep working on it.
USBE: Is the American education system as currently constituted able to meet the nation’s science and technology manpower needs going forward?
Dr. Holdren: We do need to do better. Too many of our children, particularly too many of our girls and minorities, are steering away from science and engineering and we’re trying to address that. The president has set two overarching goals relevant to science and technology, engineering and math education.
One is that American students will move from the middle to the top of the pack in science and math over the next decade and the other one is that by 2020 America will once again have the highest proportion of college graduates in the world. But within those overarching goals there have actually been three priorities in addition that the president has articulated. One is increasing science and technology, engineering and math literacy, so all students can think critically in those domains. Second is improving the quality of math and science teaching. The third is expanding science technology, engineering and math education and career opportunities for underrepresented groups, including women and minorities. All of that is important and we are working on all of that.
USBE: How important are the nation’s historically black colleges and universities in filling this void?
Dr. Holdren: I think they’re very important. And clearly they are important to ensuring that we have a diverse and well-prepared science, technology, engineering and math workforce. The nation’s historically black colleges and universities represent less than 3 percent of all the institutions of higher education in this country and yet they enroll 13 percent of the entire African American undergraduate enrollment and they award 20 percent of all the undergraduate degrees awarded to African Americans in the United States.
So they’re very important. Data from the Department of Education also indicate that a larger percentage of students at the historically black colleges and universities are selecting engineering and science majors than African Americans at other institutions are doing. So they’re particularly important in this domain we’re talking about of science and technology engineering and math education.
These institutions represent, of course, an opportunity to continue on improving the number and quality of their degree programs and we have a number of federal grant programs as the National Science Foundation and the Department of Education –almost an alphabet soup of projects and programs aimed at supporting the historically black colleges and universities in this important work they are doing.
USBE: What explains HBCU’s relative success, given that many of the most academically prepared black students appear to be choosing historically white schools, which tend to be better funded?
Dr. Holdren: Historically black colleges and universities have a high success rate in graduating the students they enroll which is probably attributable to a number of institutional strengths that they have, including supportive campus environments, and rigorous educational experiences that often include undergraduate research experiences for the students in the science, technology, engineering and math fields. One of the other relevant statistics that we have is that the students are more likely to enroll full-time at historically black colleges and universities than African American students at other universities.
So there’s been a fair amount of research on this and it’s plain that the historically black colleges and universities offer a number of characteristics that are enabling them to do well with the students they enroll.
USBE: President Obama, both in the stimulus plan and in his first budget, has pushed for big increases in federal spending on scientific research. Describe what Americans should expect the payoff to be and when will they see it?
Dr. Holdren: We know that for decades that the biggest drivers of increases in the nation’s productivity and economic growth have been science, technology and innovation. The estimates of what fraction of our economic growth is attributable to science, technology and innovation range from 35 percent to as high as 80 percent, depending on who’s doing the analysis. This is a continuing process. We have to continue to feed it by continuing to invest in research and development and continuing to create conditions that motivate the private sector to invest in research and development.
When you say when do we see the payoff, we’ve been seeing the payoff for decades. The payoff for the increases in federal support for science and technology that the Obama administration has brought forward will be seen over a time scale ranging from a couple of years to a couple of decades. That is always the way it has been. For example, in the stimulus package, there was over $18 billion for research and development. But there were also tens of billions of additional dollars for investment in infrastructure of various kinds that underpin our strength in science and technology and the economy more broadly. The energy infrastructure. The transportation infrastructure.
The communications infrastructure. And the benefits of those investments are almost instantaneous. That is as soon as you improve your transportation system, or your energy system, or your information technology infrastructure, your broadband access, and so on, you’re getting benefits essentially immediately.
USBE: Are these investments endangered by the growing worry over the deficit?
Dr. Holdren: The president made clear that we were going to freeze discretionary, non-defense spending for the next three years in light of the enormous financial challenges associated with the recent and current state of the economy. But at the same time he managed within that budget to propose again in the fiscal year 2011 budget a substantial real increases in non-defense research and development. And he did it, obviously, by cutting some other programs and projects that were deemed to be less effective or a lower priority.
We’re looking at an increase of something in the range of 5 percent in real terms in non-defense research and development for fiscal year 2011. And I think that will continue. And it will continue because the president understands the critical importance of these investments in science and technology for rebuilding our economy and for addressing the set of challenges that our country faces, from improving our health care system, getting better health care outcomes for all Americans at lower costs, to addressing the challenge at the intersection of energy and climate change, to bolstering our national and homeland security. Science and technology play immensely important roles in all these domains and the president knows it.
So I think notwithstanding the overall fiscal challenges that we face, I think we’re going to see the president keeping the commitments he made to increase support from the federal government for the National Science Foundation, for the Department of Energy Office of Science, for the National Institute of Standards and Technology Laboratories, all of which the president has put on a trajectory to double their budget over the space of a decade.
USBE: Any concern that Congress doesn’t share the president’s understanding here?
Dr. Holdren: Congress is a diverse group. It is quite apparent than not everybody in Congress shares the president’s views. But we have found ways to get the votes to pass the most important measures so far. We got in fiscal 2010 the science and technology funding we wanted and I think we’re going to get them again.
USBE: President Obama has talked about the seemingly insatiable appetite for learning he observed in students in Korea and China and said it does not auger well for the future competitiveness of the United States where many people seem much more laid back about educational achievement. Does that just reflect cultural and economic differences of some sort? Or is the United States in for a rude wake up call?
Dr. Holdren: I know that the president believes and I certainly believe that we have to do better in inspiring our kids about science, engineering, mathematics and technology. There are a lot of ways to do that. We inspired a generation of young people about science and technology during the period of the space race in the 1960s.
I was part of that generation that was influenced by the upwelling of interest in science and technology and engineering and math and the recognition of their importance that accompanied the Soviet Union beating the United States into space with the first launch of a satellite in 1957. We want to use space again to inspire our young people. The president has announced a new approach to NASA and its science and technology components and its human space exploration components.
We think there is a lot of potential for inspiring kids there. We think the energy challenge is a focus that can inspire more of our young people to become interested and engaged in science, technology, engineering and math. We think that one of the things we can be doing in this country to get more kids into these domains and to keep them there is to give them more hands-on experience.
We have a program that basically goes under the heading of “science labs for every kid” in which we want to make sure that every middle school and high school in this country has a science and engineering laboratory in which kids can learn about science and engineering by doing things rather than just being lectured at. And we supplement that with teacher training programs to make sure we have the teachers who know how to use those laboratory facilities to inspire kids.
The president’s Educate to Innovate initiative has already raised over half a billion dollars in private sector and philanthropic sector pledges of money and in-kind services to work on this task of improving STEM education at the K-12 level including this focus on teacher training, and providing laboratory facilities so that kids get excited about science and engineering in a hands-on way. So I think there is a lot we can do to increase enthusiasm for and participation in these fields among our young people.
And I should add that we have had a considerable number of events in and around the White House in which we have brought middle school science and math students and high school science and math students. They meet with the president at events around the winners of national competitions in science, engineering and math for school kids. Last year, we had an event, astronomy for kids, on the White House lawn with 150 science and math students from the D.C. area and the president and the First Lady and the First Daughters were there.
They spent well over an hour with these 150 kids looking through telescopes, talking to astronauts, and I can tell you from having been there, that set of 150 kids are never going to be the same in terms of their level of interest in science and math. And as the president put it, the discoveries that are out there waiting to be made by these kids if they stay in school and study math and science and reach for the stars are innumerable. We have a president who can inspire young people about this stuff and he’s doing it.
