Appendix F. 
THE MEANING OF FEDERAL FUNDING 
PETER BERKOWTTZ, J.D., PH.D.' 
I. INTRODUCTION 
How should the government approach the question of public 
funding of activities that are deemed controversial by the American 
people? Is it appropriate to make such decisions on moral grounds? 
Can moral grounds for such decisions be avoided? If they can’t, 
whose moral views, and of which sort, should govern, and with what 
consequences for those in the minority? 
Questions of this sort have been frequently discussed in the wake 
of President Bush’s 2001 decision regarding federal funding of 
embryonic stem cell research. In that decision, the President 
permitted federal funds to be used, for the first time, to support 
research on embryonic stem cells, but only those already in 
existence. At the same time, he made it clear that there would be no 
federal support for any research that involved or depended on any 
future destruction of human embryos. In so doing, he was upholding 
both the letter and the spirit of a Congressional enactment, the 1996 
Dickey Amendment, which prohibited the creation of embryos for use 
in experiments, or the use of embryos in research that led to their 
destruction. 
President Bush’s decision has generated a great deal of 
controversy. Most scientists and patient advocacy groups believe 
that he made the wrong decision, and that the Dickey Amendment is 
a terrible mistake. Among the objections one commonly hears to the 
President’s policy are several that concern the meaning of federal 
funding: 
(1) By withholding federal funding for research that involved the 
creation of new embryos or the future destruction of embryos in 
existence, the President has effectively banned embryonic stem cell 
research. 
'Peter Berkovhtz teaches at George Mason University School of Law and is a 
research fellow at Stanford's Hoover Institution. He has served as a senior 
consultant to the President’s Council on Bioethics. 
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