House Science, Space, and Technology Committee Organizes
House Science, Space, and Technology Committee Organizes, Approves Majority Subcommittee Assignments
“Chairman Smith: “The Science Committee oversees agency budgets of $39 billion, most of which is focused on research and development. That enables us to invest in the future, sometimes the distant future, and spur innovation, increase America’s productivity, and improve our standard of living.”
House Committee on Science, Space, and Technology Democrats Announce Subcommittee Assignments and Ranking Members
As a group, hugely underqualified.
One witnesses the scientific and technological naivite of many of these legislators with a mouth hanging open. I’m not just talking about climate change, but just flat out distrust and skepticism about scientists and what they do.
I can forgive such distrust and skepticism, sort of, maybe, but putting these folks on a federal committee to oversee science in our nation basically puts them in the position of defining (by the funds they authorize) what science is, and what it isn’t.
Of course, we see many of these kinds of folks on our local school boards, so perhaps it shouldn’t come as a complete surprise how our education system turns them out.
But the science community is passionate these days about STEM education and inspiration. I wish they were as passionate not just about training scientists, but about fostering respect and trust from the many more people who simply won’t be scientists. Maybe that’s the same thing, but perhaps not. I wish scientists would ask themselves how they screwed up so hideously in letting our education system turn out specimens like these who turn into national leaders, as well as turning out leaders who entrust them with our science dollars.
Phil Plait has a nice piece in the latest Slate called “And THESE Are the People Making Laws in Louisiana”. Read it and weep.
Jeepers, people. It is not the job of the House Committee on Science, Space and Technology to make scientific decisions. It is their job to assess the U.S. scientific and technological enterprise (including public, private, and independent sectors) with an eye to the needs and preferences of the American people >>>they were elected to represent<<< . It is not their job to represent scientists and engineers. It is their job to represent the people and the long-term national interest as they collectively see it. They do this both in regards to the spending of public monies and the setting of overall policy and legal frameworks within which the scientific enterprise operates.
Your problem is not with these Members of Congress. Your problem is with representative democracy.
p.s. And since you both clearly have some knowledge or wisdom you think these Members of Congress lack, then perhaps you should get off this blog and start communicating with (at a minimum) your Member of Congress to try to educate them as to the issues you are concerned about.
So your summary of congress is that they lack knowledge or wisdom and they somehow do not receive adequate communication from engineers and scientists, who they should also represent, and some are employed by the government. Does this suggest that they do not know how to communicate with the employees who serve this country? Or perhaps hear no evil… is the status quo, since clearly many studies show cheaper alternatives and more scientific value?Atkin’s laws 1. Engineering is done with numbers. Analysis without numbers
is only an opinion.Can one then conclude that congress works on opinion only?
These people represent a small fraction of total congressmen in the house and by reflection a small fraction of the people represented in our democracy. What I expect of our representatives is to place people who are knowledgable in the area of concern that a committee overseas.
Also the end product of an assessment is to make a decision, in this case the decision being what is funded and what is not.
Jeepers, Jim. You almost seem to be saying that scientific knowledge or insight has something remotely to do with whether these folks were elected. You know that’s not the case. Science policy has zero, relevance in the political process. That’s unfortunate, but it is decidedly so. Their scientific “preferences” were hardly part of their campaign strategy.
I’m looking at members of Congress as people who were elected to be leaders. As such, one would like to believe that the American public isn’t looking to elect people who represent their lack of knowledge about science. Are you saying that they are? Gee, I know rather little about economics, so I sure want to vote for leaders who know just as little about economics as I do. Then they can represent me faithfully. Yep, there’s representative democracy for you. What a concept!
I do find it amusing that you think you know that I spend more time on this blog than I do communicating with Congress, and educating them, but I welcome the call for more people to do it.
Given the snark of your initial post, I’m not surprised you are twisting my words.
I did not say that Congressmen lack scientific expertise because voters consciously choose that failing, I said that scientific expertise is not required to be an effective Congressional overseer of science policy and agencies.
What is required is an ability to represent the wishes, desires, opinions, and values of the American people — and especially the communities they specifically represent — with respect to science. Certainly being a scientist could help you do that, but it could also hurt you. Just as being a farmer may help one set better agriculture policy but so might being an urban mother.
Finally, I’m glad you agree that more public outreach to Congress is a good thing, but it is not fair to claim that I think I know how much time you spend blogging or reaching out to Congress.
I only know that I think your original comment was a waste of electrons that could have been better spent educating a Member or Staffer with a letter or email about a science issue.
We weren’t discussing scientific “expertise”. We’re certainly not talking about legislators “being” scientists. So your curious point about farmers and urban mothers isn’t relevant. Let’s not twist, shall we?
We were discussing distrust and skepticism about science. I believe that trust and respect for science is absolutely necessary to be an effective Congressional overseer of science policy and agencies. There are members of Congress who look down their nose at the consensus wisdom of 99% of scientists. Those legislators have no business overseeing science policy. We’re talking about legislators who are authorizing taxpayer expenditures in science.
If I were a pacifist, with marginal or no respect for military forces, would you be comfortable putting me on the Defense Authorization Committee? My view of defense might deserve respect, but it is wholly unsuited to overseeing defense policy and agencies in the way we as a nation envision defense.
In the interest of conservation of electrons, I’d really better stop there. But I suspect there are staffers and perhaps even members who are reading these remarks.
Well get off your ass and run for office. Or you might be like Mr. Muncy here and help found an organization (ProSpace) that spent over a decade EDUCATING congress on space issues of importance to the American people. Jim was instrumental in an amazing array of legislation such as the commercial space act of 1998, the zero g zero tax legislation, and even today the Obama space policy looks extremely similar to the space policy as advocated by Jim’s former employer Dana Rohrbacher.
I for one never saw you at a March Storm or the equivalent Mars Society and NSS legislative citizens lobbying events.
Instead of whining about the problem, start being part of the solution. I am getting really tired of this kind of snarky crap as they are our REPRESENTATIVES, not technical experts on these subjects.
Let’s talk a bit about getting tired of snarky crap. You guys have extraordinarily thin skin here, I think.
First of all, both of you turn what I suggest to be a national problem into a problem with me. That’s laughably absurd. That, as my high school debate coach would say, is just intellectually dumb, and shooting the messenger. If you want to argue about what we’re really discussing, then please do so, but your case thus far is about my itinerary, who I’m writing letters to, and where my ass is sitting.
Secondly, you’d be hard pressed to “see me” anywhere, since you don’t know who I am. You can argue with my words, or you can argue with your imagined picture of me. I’m not interested in the latter.
I think Mr. Muncy’s work is admirable (though let’s face it, most of his work has nothing to do with educating about science). I should point out that, to the extent that it does, he has a lot of work to do.
Helen
For ten years I did the March Storm activity (which is to go up, spend a week educating congressional staffers and occasionally the members, all on your own time and expense). The first time that we did it, which was in March of 1995 and right after the Republican revolution that changed the pecking order in the House for the first time in over 4 decades and all the democrat staffers were pissed. The majority gets the best offices and the larger offices and the dems were getting kicked out of what they thought was their property. The republicans were kinda in shock in that they were moving into the bigger offices and it was utter chaos.
There were nine of us that year and I was still a poor student. Our entire project was almost killed when the NSS pulled their support at the last minute but we said hell with em and moved ahead. We had a couple of allies inside the halls of congress and one of them was Jim Muncy. Poor Jim had this tiny office but we were able to work with him and he taught us about being citizen lobbyists as did Tim Kyger who was a Senate staffer at the time.
That year the staffers would hardly give us the time of day, some of them visibly watching their watches as we gave our pitches. Some listened and after a while you started to get a feel for which congressional office ran well and which ones were dysfunctional because the member was dysfunctional.
While this was our first March Storm it was hardly our last. We came back every year at the same time and our ranks grew. By the year 2000 we were almost 100 strong and visited virtually every house and Senate office. This was the year that we almost got Zero G Zero tax passed as legislation. We had helped get the commercial space act of 1998 passed and we even had our own lawyers writing legislation!
However, as organizations that are run by volunteers are apt to do, the enthusiasm eventually flagged and our last March Storm was two years ago. My how the times had changed. In almost every single office we were well received and the young and the older staffers treated us with respect.
I have learned so much about how our government actually functions by doing the March Storm events. We were able to get the NASA administrator (Dan Goldin) into a meeting with us we were having that much of an impact. Our current NASA Deputy administrator Lori Garver met with us every year during the Golden years and as she herself got started in politics the same way that we were doing it so yes I know where her heart is and what her limitations are so uninformed speculations tick me off there.
The problem that I have is that you are complaining about the congress people but you are doing nothing about it. It is as easy as how you write about it to tell. I have observed on occasion while we were in Washington how other lobbying organizations work. Some come in with boatloads of money. Some come in with the power of millions of grass roots members. Most come in with a passion for what they are there to talk to their EMPLOYEES about. I have also observed that if space advocates had 1/10’th passion of the pro life movement, mankind would be half way to Alpha Centauri by now.
Space is that important to our future but by far most people who like space sit on their posteriors and pontificate about how ignorant their elected leaders are and how much better things would be if x, y, or z, were true. Well hell the only way that things change is to be the change agents yourself. So this is why I am less than impressed with your pontificating on this subject and why I admire and will always be grateful for what I learned from Jim Muncy and the rest of the space advocate community.
Be the Change.
Whew. Feel better now?
Your accusation that I am “doing nothing about it” is completely unfounded. Evidence, please? Stop making things up. You don’t have a clue about what I do as a change agent. But that’s not the issue. The issue is the problem, or whether there is one, and not what I’m doing about it.
My “pontificating”? Wow. I offer a few dozen words in a blog post and instead of taking issue with those words, you and Jim take it out on me. Touched a nerve, did I?
You know, if you guys can’t handle space advocacy better that this, you’re not likely to be anywhere near Alpha Centauri for a long time. You guys have been real leaders in space evangelism, but that leadership isn’t reflected here.
You know, if you guys can’t handle space advocacy better that this, you’re not likely to be anywhere near Alpha Centauri for a long time. You guys have been real leaders in space evangelism, but that leadership isn’t reflected here.
Back at you. No I don’t know who you are but what you originally posted indicates that you have not done anything about what you were complaining about, which is the woeful state of our representatives knowledge about space. Most of these people are lawyers who are culturally unsuited to understand space. That is just a fact. Where you can influence things are in the staffers and for those congress people who care about space, they have an “expert” staffer on the subject. A lot of the time it is either a military or NASA detailee or sometimes it is a college kid who was a science major.
These guys get pummeled with so much crap they have to have a filter and a lot of the time they (now more than in the 90’s) are interested and want to understand the situation, and not just from the perspective of the prime contractors who’s lobbyists spend a LOT of time there, far more than we ever could. If you want to know why Senator Shelby supports the SLS go back in time here on NW and find the post where a bundler put together $250k for his campaign from the third tier contractors in Huntsville.
I am telling you the reality of the situation in response to your complaint about the lack of technical and scientific bonafides of congress people. No I don’t know who you are, I guess you hide yourself behind an anonymous name. Fine with me but all we have to go on is what you print here and what you printed in this thread indicates that either you have not attempted to inform our leadership which as citizens it is our responsibility to do, or you just want to complain about republicans. The ignorance quotient in congress is pretty much 50/50 from our experience.
No I am not going to let this go as I have spent the last month in a historical research on what happened to NASA in the late 1960’s. It is a 100% fact of history that LBJ lied to Webb about the NASA budget and the requirement for a NASA sacrifice, all the while he was ramping up spending on what we can see in hindsight are mostly completely useless programs. If NASA had kept the same percentage of the budget that it had in FY-1966 we would surely have a colony on Mars, lunar industrialization, and probably humans beyond Jupiter.
I am sick to death of the partisan whining and the casting of aspersions that substitutes for political discourse today. Words mean things and your few dozen words illuminated much about where you come from in the argument.
Leadership? We have all the leadership in the world, what we don’t have is follow through. We don’t have follow through because the politicians that are in Washington have other priorities, like the bread and circuses theory of getting reelected. Both parties have this, both parties like vision and the understanding that space is the solution to so many of the problems that beset our society at this time. To try and pin this on the current committee leadership in the House is simply not tenable. If the Zero G Zero tax bill that Rohrbacher promoted had passed we would be far better off today in commercial space and in NASA as we would have a much more robust commercial space industry today. He is one of the leaders that you complain about.
It is time to get beyond the oh you need a thicker skin argument as well as you are illustrating what you are attempting to illuminate in others. How about listening for once.
“You guys have extraordinarily thin skin here, I think.“
Helen,
I really hesitated before getting involved in this exchange, but I have to be honest, so I’ll be the nasty person and maybe it’ll give you some food for thought.
I don’t know who you are, your background, credentials, occupation, education, experience, or what you look like. In fact, there’s only one thing that I know for sure about you, and that’s that you bring these sorts of adversarial exchanges on yourself. Your addition of “I think” on the above statement is a somewhat unique step for you.
You showed up on NASA Watch as someone new and immediately started “correcting” all kinds of people with your posts. And you did so with unqualified assertions, rarely, if ever, qualifying anything you said as an opinion. It was as if you considered yourself to be an ultimate source of knowledge on everything being discussed and knew more and better than everybody else. You also have a habit of changing the subject when cornered.
In all honesty, I don’t believe that it’s your intention to come across as arrogant, but rather you’re doing it in the passion of the discussion without thinking about how people will react. I may be wrong on that, but I’m giving you the benefit of the doubt.
This is why some of us are so quick to refute your posts. It’s as much a cumulative reaction as it is a reaction to any given post, which may not seem fair on our part, but it’s simple human nature. In simple terms, we resent being “corrected,” and often insulted and/or dismissed out of hand, by an unknown stranger. I don’t hesitate to suggest that anyone would react that way.
For all I know, you may really be far more knowledgeable on these issues than the rest of us (though I don’t believe it’s true based on selected past statements), but that fact would mean nothing if you didn’t present your facts, ideas and opinions in a manner conducive to encouraging a productive exchange, rather than turning the other party off with your apparent arrogant attitude (and I stress the word apparent). In many ways, we’re each salespeople here with the need to present our wares (our words) in such a way as to capture the interest of the perspective “buyers,” instead of making them want to slam the door on us. Human nature also has the tendency to want to add a cutting remark to the door slam. It’s a cheap “win” but we all tend to grab it when it’s the only “repayment” we can make for having been annoyed. A well considered “sales technique” tends to achieve much better results, and often leaves the door open for mutually profitable future interactions. But enough of analogies.
I present this with the best of intentions, and would like to stress that I’m expressing my own assessment of the situation only, and don’t pretend to represent anyone else from the NASA Watch regulars. I might also add that there are a handful of other newer regulars at NW who could benefit by reading this and thinking about it. If we here can’t “work together,” then we hardly have any right to complain about the people in the space program not doing so.
If you read this far, thank you.
Steve
I, personally, am not acquainted with either the relevant knowledge or the opinions of this long list of committee/subcommittee members, so I can’t make an informed assessment of their probable ability to do the job to which they’ve been assigned. In my ignorance, I have two serious questions.
First, do those of you who have familiarity with the knowledge and opinions of a larger number of elected representatives have a list of names of available reps who you feel would better serve on these subcommittees than those currently assigned? (What I’m asking is, out of those reps who are not already busy at other things, are there any reps who you feel would be adequate to this assignment?).
Second, Mr. Muncy has recommended one course of action in response to dissatisfaction with those currently assigned. What do the rest of you, who are unhappy with the current subcommittee members, propose to do to attempt to improve on a situation that you appear to think is important but has not been “properly” staffed?
It’s easy to have an opinion of one’s own, but what are Americans, individually and/or collectively, willing to do about expressing their dissatisfaction, and/or attempting to effect changes in the situation (if that’s even possible)? Is it a fixed characteristic of representative democracy that, faced with a situation like this which you feel has not been handled properly, complaining to one another is the only resource available, or are there useful, legal alternatives to just living with it?
(Note: Although I’m very much addicted to the US space program, I am not an American, so these are not options available to me, nor questions that I can answer for myself. In Canada, communicating with either the relevant politicians or the Canadian Space Agency will get you a serious response, but really has no affect in terms of changing any policies or decisions. But there are a lot fewer of us than you, and the CSA budget is pocket change by comparison to NASA’s budget, and that perhaps gives you a lot more collective power.)
There are useful and legal alternatives to just living with it. Unfortunately these alternatives require a great deal of money to lobby or to run for office. Personally, I wish I could change some of these representatives disdain for science without having to throw endless piles of money at their campaigns. Also as someone who was raised in a Catholic family and later a brush in the Evangelican movement I can attest to the bigotry and the disdain that the Christian right has for the scientific method and anything remotely challenging their ideology.