This morning NAS president Peter Wood gave expert testimony at the hearing of the Congressional Subcommittee on Research and Science Education. He argued that the National Science Foundation (NSF) should continue to fund research in the social, behavioral, and economic sciences, but that it should make strategic cuts to unscientific programs.
Here is an excerpt from his comments:
...It's not that the NSF does that all the time, but if you look through those 1100 awards, you can probably find a segment of them that seem to be more driven by identity politics, by policy debates, rather than basic science. Is there some sort of linguistic formulation where you could absolutely draw the line so that the NSF administrators knew we’re going to do this and not that? I think that’s very difficult, but it’s certainly possible to push hard in the direction that what we want out of NSF is true basic science, not all kinds of politicized stuff dressed up as basic science.
Click on the video below to view the webcast from the hearing. Peter's testimony is from 19:42 to 25:00, and he addresses questions from 1:00:00 to 1:02:57 and from 1:14:10 to 1:15:29. If the video does not load on this page, you can click here to view it.
