US mid-term elections: 3 ways science is on the line
US voters head to the polls tomorrow to choose their representatives for Congress, and the results could have consequences for the science agenda laid out by President Joe Biden and his Democratic party. With recent polling favouring Republicans to take control of the House of Representatives and perhaps the Senate, researchers are anticipating reductions in science funding, a renewed focus on research security and heightened congressional scrutiny of science programmes being rolled out by the Biden administration.
Historically, it’s not unusual for the party that holds the White House to lose seats during the mid-term elections, two years after a president takes office. But the stakes are especially high this time around, as the country grapples with growing inflation and an energy crisis worsened by the war in Ukraine. Some fear that democracy itself is also on the line, as former president Donald Trump and many of the candidates he has endorsed at both the state and national level continue to question — without any evidence — the results of the 2020 election that put Biden in office. Already, some Republicans are threatening to impeach Biden if their party takes power.
Even though it might not be at the top of the list of hot-button issues, science has a role in the election, says David Cole, president of the Science History Institute in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. “Keeping the conversation going around the importance of science as a truth-making enterprise goes hand in hand with being supportive of democracy and truth in elections,” he adds.
Here, Nature examines what is at stake for science on 8 November.
Congressional inquiry
Control of the US Congress comes with substantial oversight power, and many scientists expect to see enhanced scrutiny of science programmes and leaders if Republicans win either the House or the Senate.
House Republicans have already called for an investigation of a top climate official in the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy, Jane Lubchenco. She was sanctioned in August by the US National Academy of Sciences for violating scientific-integrity rules (she edited a paper published in the academy’s journal in 2020 that was authored by a family member). Observers who spoke to Nature say that this could be just the beginning if Republicans take charge.
With the levers of Congress under their control, Republicans would surely challenge the Biden administration on controversial policies and probe any missteps, says Michael Lubell, a physicist at the City College of New York who tracks federal science-policy issues. Many Republicans are angry about the Democrats’ investigation into the 6 January storming of the US Capitol, as well as what they regard as undue interference in the Trump administration, he says. “And there is no question that there will be payback.” Researchers say this means that agency leaders could be called before Congress on any number of issues, ranging from the US response to the COVID-19 pandemic to the administration’s handling of new funds for clean-energy programmes.
One US agency that could be particularly hard hit is the historically bipartisan National Institutes of Health (NIH), says Allen Segal, who is the chief advocacy officer of the American Society for Microbiology in Washington DC. House Republicans have already signalled that they plan to investigate the NIH’s supervision of the Wuhan Institute of Virology in China, to which the biomedical agency had given funds before the pandemic for the study of coronaviruses. Some congressional Republicans have consistently speculated that the SARS-CoV-2 coronavirus might have been released by the virology lab, and they are sceptical that the NIH properly vetted and monitored any risky research that the lab was carrying out. Many virologists and evolutionary biologists dispute this theory, citing a lack of direct evidence.
“Going back 25 years, there’s never been a question of bipartisan support for NIH,” Segal says. But a heightened political environment as a result of the pandemic and the spread of misinformation have raised questions about NIH activities as never before — and could end up eroding that bipartisan environment, he says. Republicans have also vowed to investigate Anthony Fauci, who announced that he would retire later this year as director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, in connection with COVID-19’s origins and the country’s pandemic response.
Stricter scrutiny could also be troublesome for the nascent Advanced Research Projects Agency for Health (ARPA-H), an organization launched by the Biden administration in March that will fund high-risk, high-reward biomedical research. Congress has not yet passed a bill explicitly authorizing ARPA-H’s creation. Policymakers continue to disagree about where the agency’s offices should be located and how independent it should be of the NIH, under which it is currently housed. If Republicans take over, “there is some concern we won’t see the potential for ARPA-H come to fruition”, says Peter Jensen, an immunologist who heads the public-affairs committee of the American Association of Immunologists in Rockville, Maryland.
Tightening the purse strings
Science usually draws bipartisan support in Congress. But “Republicans tend to be in favour of greater defence spending”, says Matt Hourihan, associate director for research and development and advanced industry at the Federation of American Scientists, an advocacy organization in Washington DC. That means non-defence funding, from which science agencies get their money, might suffer. In particular, agencies such as the National Science Foundation (NSF) could have a harder time securing budget increases under a Republican-controlled Congress, Hourihan says.
This could be a challenge for the CHIPS and Science Act, which authorized US$280 billion for science and technology programmes across multiple federal agencies, including what would be a historic boost in funds for the NSF. Although Congress passed the legislation in July, Republican leadership in the House had urged opposition.
Allocating the funds through the annual appropriations process that is still in progress could become harder if Republicans gain control of the House, says Deborah Altenburg, who serves as associate vice-president for research policy and government affairs at the Association of Public and Land-Grant Universities in Washington DC. “We have to really push to get the science portion of the CHIPS and Science Act funded.”
To make matters even more difficult, several veteran members of Congress who usually influence appropriations, and who have championed federal support for biomedical research, are retiring this year, says Jennifer Zeitzer, who leads the public-affairs office at the Federation of American Societies for Experimental Biology in Rockville. The loss of all that institutional knowledge at once will make the next Congress’s support for science more unpredictable, she says.
Research security
Early this year, the Biden administration formally closed a Department of Justice programme known as the China Initiative, which launched in 2018 under the Trump administration to counter efforts by the Chinese government to steal secrets from US businesses and laboratories. Concerns about research security remain high on both sides of the political aisle, but the justice department ended the programme partly because of the perception that the initiative discriminated unfairly against scientists of Chinese heritage.
Some Republicans are already pushing legislation to reinstate the programme. If both chambers of Congress become Republican-controlled, such legislation could gain momentum — but it would be hard to fully bring back the initiative as long as Biden is in charge, observers say.
Meanwhile, concerns about Chinese espionage, national security and economic competitiveness have created new space for bipartisanship among Democrats and Republicans. For instance, 24 House Republicans bucked the party leadership’s call by supporting the CHIPS and Science Act, arguing that the legislation could reduce reliance on China by fostering the domestic production of semiconductors.
Similar political forces are at play in the climate and energy arena. Although Republicans have steadfastly opposed legislation to curb greenhouse-gas emissions, many supported major investments in clean energy sought by the Biden administration and Democrats. The upshot is that more than half a trillion dollars in clean-energy investments have been locked in with the passage of a pair of major bills over the past year.
“There’s a pretty solid front against both China and Russia, and it’s tied to economic-development objectives as well,” says David Hart, who tracks energy issues at the Information Technology and Innovation Foundation in Washington DC. That was a strong unifying factor in this last Congress, Hart says, and is likely to continue in the next one, regardless of how the election plays out.
doi: https://doi.org/10.1038/d41586-022-03574-y
