In the spirit of the upcoming March for Science this weekend, I wanted to post a proposal for the evolution of the current conflicts where science, the government, and society intersect.
I would like to propose to the American people, a fourth branch of government: the Scientific Branch.
In illuminating my motivations for writing this piece, I would just like to quote one of my all-time role models, the American physicist Richard Feynman. This is how he ends his controversial Minority Report on the 1986 Space Shuttle Challenger explosion:
For a successful technology, reality must take precedence over public relations, for nature cannot be fooled.
With the administration of the current president, but also seen throughout the country where Republicans are in charge, there is a significant assault on science and science policy. Climate change, science education standards, and health policy are all notable examples, but far from the only ones.
Scientists, teachers, and doctors are all on the front lines of defending science and its teachings, and pushing for policies that reflect what the scientific evidence points to as the best courses of action. However, in many cases, the science community has little leverage over policy, sometimes even on how the debate is framed in public discourse.
With the newest presidential administration, we have seen how these current clashes have put Science and scientists directly on the front lines. Scientists are being muffled by the new administration, their work is being hidden, and their programs are being defunded and starved of resources. This type of pressure is meant to keep the Science community from using its own voice— and, while this type of political pressure has had a lot of publicity lately, the fact is that this is not the first administration to exert such control.
In my mind, looking at how the current culture clashes over science and the role of scientists in this country are playing out, I think what the future brings is this: A fourth branch of the government, a Scientific branch, equal to the Executive, Legislative, and Judicial Branches originally established by the Constitution, which has greater control over the Science-based policies in this country. Even if such a fourth branch never explicitly comes into existence, an alternative would be many of the already established government agencies, such as the NSF, CDC, NIH, NASA, USGS, NOAA, FDA, EPA, etc, organizing into a more centralized governing body, with additional powers granted through legislative and executive measures.
This proposal is not meant as some wishful, esoteric thinking that has little basis in reality. I consider this level of organization an inevitability of the current policy clashes between the Science-based community, the general public, and corporate-backed groups that want policy dictated by profits over evidence. I think it is only a matter of time. As more scientists demand greater access to legislation and crafting policy, and as more taxpayers demand an end to wasteful and damaging laws and regulations that are disconnected from the most current scientific information available, there will be a need for a more overt, structured influence on science-related policy.
The motivations for such a drastic change should be obvious to most observers. If one looks at the conflicts over climate change, over the teaching of Evolution, over the push for renewable energies, invariably the policies backed by the science community are besieged and sabotaged by a side typically profiting from the opposing viewpoints. And going further, they prop up and fund their own so-called science branches to undermine the actual science. Because of this over-politicization of Science, it seems altogether imperative that the Science community gains greater ability to shape policy in this country.
The Scientific Branch is needed to ensure policy in this country is supported by evidence and research, over profits and partisanship. If we look at what the separate branches do (granted, an oversimplification) : The Legislative Branch legislates; it writes the laws. The Executive Branch administers; it enforces the laws. The Judicial Branch adjudicates; it interprets the laws. The Scientific Branch then, what it would do would be to educate; it informs the laws.
The Scientific Branch would be tasked with ensuring the laws and regulations of this country, as far as they pertain to issues that touch Science and Medicine, are written to reflect the prevailing scientific knowledge available. And, if legislators or the executive branch take actions that contradict this mandate, the Scientific Branch would have the means to block their being enacted, and to inform the American public when such action is warranted.
What would such a hypothetical Scientific Branch look like? Well, first I would like to note that this post is simply an introduction to the idea, and I will put some suggestions of what I think the Scientific Branch would look like. However, it should be understood that I will be leaving out a lot of details of how such policies wold be implemented, because, after all, at this point, I am simply trying to convince people that such a step is even necessary.
So, here are some example proposals in enacting the Scientific Branch:
The Power to Elect its Own Leaders
Similar to Congress and the President, the Scientific Branch (for example, the heads of the current major Scientific agencies) should be people elected to their positions, rather than appointed. On the other hand, because they are tasked with leading highly-technical agencies, it would not make sense to have them being elected by the general public. The Scientific community should be the ones electing the leaders of the Scientific Branch. As an example: representatives from all the public universities that receive federal funding would be identified as the Science Electors. The Scientific Branch would be elected to fixed terms similar to Congress and the President, and with a limit to how many terms they can serve.
This would be a step in giving the Scientific Branch greater autonomy, and less potential to be manipulated by political pressure, along with:
Control Over Science Funding
Even while certain political groups cannot negate the agencies they ideologically oppose, defunding them has always been an alternative way to undermine their power. The Scientific Branch should therefore be allowed to determine its own funding (obviously, to an extent), how specific programs and research are funded, and who gets employed. This could be implemented, for example, by ensuring Scientific representatives are part of the budgeting process, or requiring that a certain percentage of spending is always reserved for the Scientific Branch.
This greater autonomy and control does come at a price. Ultimately, the Scientific Branch should have the express requirement of serving the public with the most qualified and comprehensive Scientific information available. To those ends, the Scientific Branch should also have the following:
A Mandate to Inform the Public
Anytime Congress or the President takes any action that touches on relevant issues, the Scientific Branch will be tasked with providing evidence and information to explicitly support their positions, but also be tasked with making it known if they are trying to take action that flies completely in the face of the scientific evidence. Much like politicians are given platforms in the public to campaign and voice their opinions on matters of great import, corresponding platforms will be made available for representatives of the Scientific Branch to directly inform the public. For example, a channel similar to C-SPAN, which might be called SCI-SPAN.
A Scientific Veto
Much like the President has the power to veto any law the Legislature passes, the Scientific Branch would have the power to veto any law, on the grounds that it contradicts the currently-accepted science that is available. For example, if Congress passed a law requiring teaching Creationism in schools. On the other hand, the Legislative Branch can override the President’s veto, and a parallel override can be effected for the Scientific Veto.
Constant Transparency
In principle, this greater independence for the Scientific Branch is meant to minimize the effect that politics plays in setting the Science agenda in this country. However, it would be ridiculous to think that the Science community is not susceptible to many of its own political machinations. For example: if a Scientific Branch is ever implemented, one can reasonably surmise that many of the industry lobbyists who currently ply their trades on Capitol Hill would simply move their operations to the universities and various research sites.
Therefore, the Scientific Branch should make it the utmost priority to ensure transparency at all levels. All elected Science representatives should have their entire professional resumes public. All research data and reports should be available to the public, free of charge. Research, even when it is contradictory to current policies, should never be suppressed. Even when issues are highly technical, the Scientific Branch should make it a regular practice to inform the public in the most broad ways possible. This principle reflects one of the most basic tenets of the foundation that is Science, this idea of openness and transparency.
Again, these are all examples, to give a sense of what a Scientific Branch would mean theoretically. It is not meant to go into all the details that would go into the Scientific Branch in practice. To quote Yogi Berra, “In theory, there is no difference between theory and practice. In practice, there is.”
In presenting this idea of a Scientific Branch, up to now I have been careful to present it in a way that shows that it could be achieved even without an actual Scientific Branch per se, but rather, simply through the existing agencies getting more organizational powers, and getting more responsibility and autonomy, so you might then think of them as a quasi-Scientific Branch.
On the other hand, I do think there are real benefits to having an actual Scientific Branch, something explicitly mandated by Amendments to the US Constitution.
First, there are some things that a more collective Scientific Branch could take responsibility for, that no single government agency could be expected to handle effectively on its own. Combating and preparing for climate change is one example, which requires the most sophisticated monitoring and data collection to understand the impacts of climate change; research institutions focused on finding and testing various methods to combat climate change; and groups tasked with educating the public on climate change, and helping people at all levels of our society respond to the impending threats.
Then, there are probably functions that a Scientific Branch could serve, that we may not have even thought of yet. An example might be: Bringing medicines and treatments into public ownership. There are many medicines and treatments that are widely needed, yet inaccessible to the whole of society, usually due to things like their costs, patents, or control of manufacturing processes. Think, for example of the treatments that are already out there, for illnesses like HIV/AIDS and cancer. Another example might be diseases where vaccines are already known to be effective. The Scientific Branch could have the power to purchase the patents/control of these medicines and treatments — in other words, purchased by all the American taxpayers — but would ensure that those treatments are widely available cheaply to anyone who needs it — in other words, we all would benefit, in that our country as a whole would be healthier, live longer, and live better quality lives. This seems like the kind of thing that could only be accomplished by a governing body equally as powerful as one of the branches of government.
Finally, the last, yet probably most significant reason, I see that a Scientific Branch should explicitly be achieved through amending our Constitution, is the symbolism in such an act in itself.
The Constitution is an archaic governing framework. Yes, it has served us well for a couple hundred years, but it was written at a time when people could not foresee all that science and technology could do to improve our lives. And, as we have seen on many occasions, this limit to the technical foresight of the Framers has resulted in a constant state of our governing bodies lagging behind technological advances.
By adding a Scientific Branch to the Constitution, we would symbolically be bringing the Constitution into the modern day, and fittingly, to address some of the most modern issues that the Constitution has ever been needed to address. It would finally be acknowledging that, while the American people and its democratically-elected representatives should be in charge of establishing the country’s laws and regulations, we are long past the age where such laws can be disconnected from the information and science to back it up. The laws of this country should also reflect the most up-to-date knowledge we have available, because collective knowledge is probably the single greatest achievement of all mankind. Almost fittingly, a Constitutional amendment to create a Scientific Branch, would symbolically be taking the Constitution — and how we govern our country — out of the so-called Dark Ages, and into a new age of Enlightenment.
It is for all these reasons that I would like to propose to the American people, a fourth branch of government: the Scientific Branch.