President Gagosian’s Comments at the March 2011 Members Meeting

 Selected Comments from Robert B. Gagosian’s Presentation at the
Consortium for Ocean Leadership Members Meeting
March 10, 2011 including updated federal budget information as of April 18, 2011

I would like to set the framework for what I consider a very important event occurring in this country that hopefully will elicit some discussion.

Due to the election last November, the Republicans won a majority in the House of Representatives. The elected group of freshmen is set on an agenda of deficit cutting and not compromising. We have seen this behavior exhibited many times over the past several weeks. Even the Republican House establishment has not been able to change the freshmen’s agenda of cutting $100 billion from the President’s proposed 2011 budget ($60 billion from the enacted 2010 budget).

Currently the Senate is controlled by the Democrats, 53 to 47 including 2 independents voting with the Democrats. However, they have not yet openly challenged the House. In addition the 2012 elections are looming. In 2012 Democrats have to defend 21 of the 33 seats up for election. In other words, fiscal constraints are not going to get better.

The FY11 appropriation showdown, which ran half way into the fiscal year and within an hour from a government shutdown, clearly demonstrated the tough fiscal environment that our nation and Congress face. Furthermore, the Republican’s $6 trillion deficit reduction plan, which passed the House last week, was quickly countered by the President giving a speech outlining a $4 trillion plan. Regardless of the details of these plans, it appears clear that an already difficult budget outlook is going to be getting tougher in the coming years.

The fate for science in the upcoming budget battles is hard to decipher. Overall, science agencies were not targeted for as deep cuts as were many other programs. However, the FY11 accord effectively took us off the doubling path for basic research funding as called for in the NAS Rising above the Gathering Storm Report and the America’s COMPETES Act. So, while NSF received a relatively small $60M cut from the FY10 enacted budget in the FY11 budget accord, the agency is approximately half a billion below the baseline it had anticipated. Thus, decisions on major programs, the regional class vessels and other new infrastructure initiatives will be much more difficult.

Interestingly, the original GOP House continuing resolution treated NSF quite well, providing the agency with approximately $300 million above the FY10 level. Unfortunately, the Tea Party members objected that the bill only cut $34 billion from the FY10 levels, resulting in the House passing an additional $30 billion in cuts, which then resulted in a real cut for NSF below the FY10 level. The Senate’s first attempt to pass a continuing resolution, which included only $7 billion in overall cuts, contained a $100 million cut for NSF below the FY10 level. So, in the end science funding wasn’t a partisan issue, but it was one of many victims in the budget battles.

So how do we plan and how do we predict? Let’s look at the following five factors:

1. The high federal deficit and the attention it is getting. Obama’s extension of the Bush tax cuts passed late last year makes this a much bigger problem. In addition there are significant political obstacles to tackling entitlement reform, which will be essential in bringing down the deficit.

2. The upcoming 2012 election and the attention it is getting at both the Presidential and Congressional level.

3. The degree to which the rank and file Republicans are appeasing the more conservative part of their party so they can at least survive their individual primaries in 2012, which many of the moderate Republican incumbents did not accomplish in the 2010 election.

4. The extremely difficult budget situation that many states are experiencing, and its negative impact on University budgets, and

5. The difficulty of raising federal taxes to balance increasing government costs.

The unprecedented synthesis of the above mentioned five factors could not only lead to a scenario of no increase in science budgets for several years, but actual decreases. Ocean sciences may be affected in a more acute way than other sciences, because we are so dependant on infrastructure and those costs keep increasing. The high cost of oil is especially disconcerting.

So, after that rosy picture, where does that leave us? We can continue with the same approach as the past 70 years competing against each other for ownership of infrastructure and wanting to be the best in everything rather than making strategic research choices at our universities and research institutions.

I suggest to you that this is a formula for slow death of our field. So, I would like to put three ideas on the table that deal with focused research areas, laboratory infrastructure, and at-sea infrastructure.

1. Focused Research – Where institutions would agree ahead of time for a limited number of institutions to become expert in a specific scientific area and other institutions in other areas. I realize that for teaching purposes, there needs to be expertise in core material. Of course, this approach would take some real institutional leadership with difficult choices to be made. It would also take working together and raising the level of trust. But, if Jack Sawyer, when he was President of Williams College in the early 1960’s, could end fraternities and open the College’s doors to women at one of the last college bastions of the Brahmins from the North, then I submit that this can be done.

2. Laboratory Infrastructure – Develop “Centers for Excellence” for instrumentation, using the model already in place for several years at the National Institutes of Health (NIH) for mass spectrometers. Mass spectrometers are expensive. Why does every scientist have to have their own specific one, and why does every university have to have a whole suite of them? The French have adopted the same model as NIH. Both have been in place for over 25 years and are operating successfully. This model not only saves money, but it allows for centers of technical expertise and critical mass to exist. There are already some successful examples in the ocean sciences with large expensive equipment such as wave tanks and accelerator mass spectrometers.

3. At-sea Infrastructure – If the ocean science community has to survive on extremely tight budgets, it has to reframe how ships are viewed, planned for, and funded within the community. This reframing is the one that the Board working group led by Mark Abbott has recommended. The issue is to look long term and consider ships a community issue not an institution-by-institution issue. I fully recognize that this is a tough one to handle because, as I only know too well, ships are viewed as crowns at institutions, and it is difficult for kings and queens to rule their realms without crowns!

My point in bringing up these three ideas is not to suggest that any of them would lead us to nirvana. But, rather to suggest that if we don’t change the way we do business, and we continue on the same path of the past 70 years, we risk becoming more and more a boutique science in our institutions and this country.  Because, we won’t have the world class, cutting edge technology and scientific expertise and excellence to make the case for science funding in order for the U.S. to be the leaders of the world in ocean sciences. We are already moving down this path. Take a trip to China.

I fully recognize that situations like the one that we are facing today look like they have occurred before, such as in the early 1990’s when the Navy was moving away from blue water oceanography to littoral research. But, I recall that those situations were changes in research direction. That is not what I am talking about here.

In addition, in past situations we were not starting in such a financial hole. Look at the ship situation as an example. In the past there was some wiggle room and some time. In this situation I don’t see much room to maneuver.

I have talked to many people over the years who ask why oceanographers are so combative and work so hard against each other. How many times have we heard that when things get difficult, oceanographers surround the wagons and point the guns inward, when we are actually being attacked from outside the circle? We are not the enemy; our competition is for other uses of the federal budget. I am suggesting that this behavior has to change because the situation we are in is a dramatic sea change from which we will not go back.

So, this is a big problem. But you know, Einstein said that recognizing and facing a problem was 50% of the solution. Will we continue to be in a state of denial? I also suggest to you that in chaotic and depressing times, there is opportunity. While others are wringing their hands, those who accept and embrace change move forward and succeed.

The choice is ours. Are you ready to make tough choices and lead because the decisions you make now will dramatically affect the future of this field?