Over the past year, we’ve seen several countries firing government scientists and reducing investment in research. In the quest for budgetary savings, the Australian research agency, CSIRO, cut hundreds of positions. Advancing a philosophical commitment to small government in the USA, the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) cut staff and funding in a chaotic and haphazard manner, as well as ideologically driven cuts to the Environmental Protection Agency’s (EPA) Research Office, resulting in a 30% reduction in research staff. In Canada, the federal government is actively reducing the number of scientists in Environment and Climate Change Canada agency, laying off up to 840 people.
Let me start of by say that I would describe my political philosophy and a social pragmatist. While I believe that societies should provide equal benefits to all of its citizens, I recognize that the modern political and governance systems we’ve built come with severe resource constraints. I think that under such constraints evaluating government agencies for efficiency and effectiveness against their key goals and desired outcomes can help focus missions and ensure they deliver on their mandates. This is what five or ten-year reviews are for. The results of simply cutting budgets and laying off staff are: 1) likely to reduce the ability to achieve agencies’ goals; 2) endanger evidence-based policy making; and 3) inflict unnecessary harm on the people being laid off.
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| I asked AI for an image of government science, and this is what it gave me. I suspect that this is what some anti-government conspiracy theorists also envision. |
Can government agencies be too big?
The answer is yes, without strong guardrails and focus on mission, agencies can get large and inefficient. The First Law of Organizational Inertia is that if resources are available, organizations will grow. Organizations grow through three main processes:
1) Drift: where without strong management and oversight, any organization will start to adopt new mandates and priorities, which move away from core missions. This happens as powerful and influential individuals within organizations steer resources to personal priorities.
2) Organizational feudalism: where individuals amass organizational power through growing their bureaucratic fiefs, and making new priorities and processes that become central to the bureaucratic operation of the organization, but fail to advance the core mission (for how this can hinder the success of university researchers and teachers, read here).
3) Mandate growth: obviously government organizations grow because of societal need or government mandate. For example, as new compounds emitted by human activities are classified as pollutants, government scientists are needed to monitor and develop mitigation strategies.
Government agencies grow and this growth can be functional (meeting regulatory or societal needs) or it could be expansionist (growing for growths sake without improving mission delivery). These models of growth can be distinguished from one another, whether growth has been balanced between those who deliver the mission (e.g., researchers in a science agency) and those who administer the organization, versus massive growth in bureaucratic staff without growth in mission-oriented staff, and accompanied by a reduction in efficiency. As you can probably tell, I am not opposed to organizational reviews that evaluate efficiency and effectiveness in delivering core missions, and to reallocate resources to ensure this efficiency and effectiveness. Moreover, if cuts are required, the first and primary focus should be on bureaucratic and administrative structure.
Government science cuts do harm
Simply cutting research staff in government agencies, whether motivated by financial or philosophical reasons, will have negative consequences. These cuts reduce the capacity of governments to obtain facts and understanding that can be instrumental for developing policy and management strategies, and for addressing crises. To be able to dismiss the potential negative consequences of research cuts, there are only two possible positions one can take. The first is that academic and private research has the capacity to provide necessary information, and so that government research is largely redundant. The second is that data and facts are of little value for government policies.
Government science is unique
Academic researchers, like me, have the unique privilege to pursue topics and questions that interest them. These research topics are usually informed by some combination of personal interest and curiosity, the state of knowledge within a particular field, availability of funds, and a desire to make the world better. Academic research doesn’t have strong constraints on how theoretical or practical research is, and both can be impactful. Researchers working in the private sector usually have clear deliverables and short timelines. They are constrained by a company’s research and development schedule and the need to add value to a product or service.
Government science contains elements of both academic and industry science in that government scientists usually have more latitude and time than industry researchers, but are more constrained by deliverables and practical outcomes than academics. Academics are often motivated by fame and glory, and industry scientists by profitability. Government science is uniquely focused on providing data and information to inform the public, governments and the decisions they make. Neither academia nor industry provide sufficient motivation to fill this role unless the government is willing to pay.
The important contribution of government scientists is to test and monitor. They test impacts, say of potential pollutants, outcomes, like restoration success, and scenarios. They also monitor systems and evaluate against government guidelines. As Christine Bishop, retired Canadian research scientist, points out, only government scientists are tasked with monitoring the accumulation, movement and fate of environmental contaminants through food webs. No one else does this in a comprehensive and standardized way, and this information is absolutely needed for management and enforcement. Further, we cannot rely on industry to monitor itself, especially when it comes to evaluating the potential long-term health and environmental risks of new products. If our governments have created environmental and industry regulations, but no one is monitoring, can these policies be effective?
Maybe governments don’t need information?
Perhaps governments don’t need all this information. If governments don’t care or use this information, then why collect it? As the EPA Administrator, Lee Zeldin, makes clear, the massive cuts to his agency are all about saving money and to reign in an out-of-control leftist agenda. Setting aside the fact that Mr. Zeldin has no qualifications to evaluate the science the EPA does (which is not uncommon for government leaders to not understand the details of what their agencies actually do, but this lack of qualification seems especially true for the current US administration, from health to education to environment), these are not sufficient or defensible reasons to cut research, and can only be done with the bravado of ignorance. The current US government, or any government slashing research, might feel confident in ideology as a premise for policy, but the unfortunate reality is that ideology doesn’t solve problems. Evidence-based solutions solve problems. Future governments will face crises and will not have sufficient data and understanding to prevent, mitigate, or recover from these crises. The slashing governments seldom face the consequences of their cuts, but society does over the long-term.
So what then?
Sometimes financial constraints require austerity (there is a larger conversation about the financial systems we’ve invented and whether they need to be re-invented in a way that actually benefits all people). If this is the case, there are ways to do this that protect agency missions and the generation of information needed for enforcement and policy. Government research serves an invaluable role in governance and cutting it in haphazard ways will have long-term negative consequences for nature and people.
