92 



68 / SUPPLEMENT 3 



Departments and agencies with more focused missions, however, such as the 

 Department of Energy or the Department of Health and Human Services can, to 

 some degree, choose whether to pursue their ultimate objectives by funding R&D 

 or by supporting other kinds of programs in, for example, education, public health, 

 regulation, or direct service delivery. For them, allocations to R&D result from a 

 complex set of negotiations among the department's various bureaus, congressional 

 oversight committees, and the Office of Management and Budget. Coordination of 

 R&D in such agencies with that in other agencies may take a distinct second place 

 to the intraagency struggles for resources. Most such agencies have external scien- 

 tific or technical review and advisory' boards, but these groups tend to focus on 

 identifying R&D needs and opportunities and on allocating funds among projects 

 and performers, rather than on allocations among broad objectives or between R&D 

 and alternative implementation modalities. 



Congress has always exercised its prerogatives in directing federal agencies to 

 fund specific projects in particular locations — so called "ear-marked" activities. Not 

 until the early 1980s, however, was this practice used for funding R&D facilities and 

 projects. Since then, R&D earmarks have become commonplace, especially in the 

 jurisdictions of certain appropriations subcommittees and in the budgets of certain 

 agencies, such as the Department of Defense and Department of Energy. Earmarks 

 to academic institutions have amounted to more than 5 percent of federal R&D 

 funding to colleges and universities in recent years. While one rationale for such 

 funding is that some institutions and some regions are less well prepared than 

 others to compete for federal funds, a significant proportion of the academic ear- 

 marks has gone to institutions and states that are also successful in the open compe- 

 tition for federal agency funds. 



Competitive Merit Review Is Most Relevant 

 to Allocations Among Projects 



One of the hallmarks of the postwar R&D system has been the detailed scien- 

 tific and technical agenda influenced by the scientific and technical communities. 

 To a first approximation, policymakers have set broad goals and directions, while 

 members of the scientific and technical communities have designed projects, pro- 

 posed priorities among them, and helped evaluate the results. Part of the "social 

 contract" between science and government struck after World War II was that scien- 

 tists would play major roles in providing advice about the scientific agenda, while 

 policymakers would set broad strategic goals and provide the resources needed to 

 reach them. This model has been most clearly implemented through the use of the 

 ■peer review" system to choose among research projects supported by the National 

 Science Foundation and National Institutes of Health (see Box II. 8). 



The mission agencies have tended to employ their in-house scientific and 

 technical staff to make funding decisions and to evaluate the outcomes of R&D 

 projects focused on the governments own needs. This practice reflects the fact that 

 government agencies must be accountable for achieving the results they set out to 

 reach and that such work is carried out under contracts rather than grants. Increas- 

 ingly, however, such agencies as the Environmental Protection Agency, U.S. Depart- 

 ment of Agriculture, and Department of Energy have used external peer reviewers 

 to augment the judgments of in-house staff. 



