Science funding won’t be frozen under McCain plan, adviser says

Republican presidential nominee John McCain would exempt funding for scientific research from the across-the-board federal spending freeze he’s promised on the campaign trail, a campaign adviser said Tuesday.

The McCain budget plan includes “a specific carve-out for spending on science,” said Ike Brannon, a senior policy adviser to the McCain campaign.

{mosads}“You’ll definitely see, under John McCain, more spending on research,” Brannon said.

Sen. McCain (Ariz.) has emphasized his intention to hold flat federal spending on programs not connected to defense, veterans’ programs or homeland security as a key part of his fiscal platform.

“I recommend a spending freeze that — except for defense, Veterans Affairs, and some other vital programs, we’ll just have to have [an] across-the-board freeze,” McCain said during his second presidential debate against Sen. Barack Obama (Ill.), the Democratic candidate, on Oct. 7.

The McCain campaign, however, has committed to upping funding for federal research agencies, Brannon said at a briefing sponsored by Research!America, an advocacy group made up of hundreds of organizations including universities, pharmaceutical companies, physician societies and patient groups.

McCain will pay for the increases in science funding by cutting other programs, Brannon explained.

According to the candidate’s website, he would conduct a “comprehensive review of all programs” when drawing up his budget.

Research funding for federal agencies is of immense importance to influential and well-funded interests such as those that make up Research!America’s membership.

Academic research centers depend on financial support from the federal government and lobby Congress heavily for grants and ever-increasing funding streams. Technology companies and drug makers rely on federal programs to pay for the speculative, basic research that serves as the foundation for the work they do to create new products and bring them to market.

“Basic research is just the stuff that’s not going to be done by the market, but it’s definitely where I think the government gets the most bang for its buck,” said Brannon, a former adviser to Sen. Orrin Hatch (R-Utah) and former Treasury Department official.

Though basic research does not appear on its face to pay dividends to the government, the downstream benefits are evident when new technologies emerge, Obama campaign policy adviser Tim Westmoreland said. “If you move to technology research, you can show cost effectiveness … you can see,” said Westmoreland, a former Clinton administration health official and former aide to Rep. Henry Waxman (D-Calif.).

Brannon highlighted McCain’s support for the “America Competes Act,” a law enacted in August 2007 with bipartisan support that, among other things, will double federal spending on physical science research by 2016.

{mospagebreak}Funding under this law will go to agencies such as the National Science Foundation, the Department of Energy and the National Institute of Standards and Technology.

Last month, Brannon was less definitive about McCain’s commitment to science funding, according to a report published on the website of Science magazine.

Addressing a room full of lobbyists advocating more money for research, Brannon indicated that science programs would be subject to the same critical evaluation as other items not related to defense, veterans and security.

{mosads}“[T]he freeze applies to the entire budget, most of which doesn’t relate to science,” Brannon said, according to the report. Consistent with his remarks on Tuesday, though, Brannon added that McCain “hopes to be able to find savings from earmarks, from unnecessary subsidies, and from other programs that could then be applied to research.”

Obama would seek to double funding over 10 years, Westmoreland told The Hill.

Obama and his running mate, Sen. Joe Biden (D-Del.), unlike McCain, were among the 69 co-sponsors of the “America Competes Act” version of this legislation, which passed the upper chamber by unanimous consent and the House by voice vote.

Under McCain, funding also would increase for NASA and the National Institutes of Health (NIH), Brannon said. After noting that several years of essentially flat funding have passed since the Clinton and Bush administrations, along with Congress, completed a project to double the NIH budget to $27 billion in fiscal 2003, Brannon said it was time to increase funding.

“Now is the time to kind of begin again,” he said. “That’s certainly what Sen. McCain is committed to do.”

The campaign surrogates offered critical assessments of President Bush’s record on science policy and funding.

“We’ve differed with the administration on a number of things, most significantly on stem cell research. Sen. McCain is a big proponent of stem cell research and he feels there’s been a big opportunity lost in delaying the ability of the federal government to assist researchers on this,” Brannon said.

Westmoreland offered a scathing assessment of Bush. “I think it’s fair to say that the current administration has subordinated science to politics in almost every aspect,” he said, citing the president’s positions on stem cells, climate change, abstinence-only sex education and emergency contraception.

Seemingly keying off Democratic rebukes of Bush such as those, Brannon said McCain would approach controversial issues differently. “I think he’s a very open-minded man and he’s the kind of guy who is going to not let his ideological blinders, such as they might be, get in the way of making sure that that science is done,” he said.