The negative consequences of cutting government science

  

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.

 

 

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.

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Recentring the research and teaching mission of universities: The horror of tracking my work hours

For years, I keep telling people that I need to work a lot in order to stay on top of things. Gone are the days of the professor sitting in their office thinking, or only showing up to teach after spending hours in a smoky coffee shop reading and writing. No, the 21^st century professor is more of a small business owner, dealing with immense administrative burdens like hiring and time sheets, reimbursements, purchasing, health and safety, scheduling exams, financial reporting, teaching assistant duty forms, and so on. The thing is, none of these responsibilities has much to do with a professor delivering the teaching and research missing of the university. But more on this later.

I had a very busy several months last semester. I taught two courses, one of them new with a lab, which I built from scratch, and grant proposals, research travels, all alongside graduate student mentoring and performing research. I decided to track my work hours for a month. And the outcome was shocking.

 

I kept a spreadsheet open on my computer and marked an ‘X’ in an hour slot if I performed work activities for more than 30 minutes. I did travel for one week, which is not abnormal for me, I travel for work about 25% of the time. I also had COVID for a week, which slowed me down a little, but basically worked, slept, worked, slept for a couple of days.

 

 

I worked a total of 253 hours in the month of October. Put another way, I worked more than 63 hours per week on average. That’s more than 50% more than what a regular work week should be. Fortunately, I’m not a very good sleeper.

 

I’m not arguing for more money (though I wouldn’t say no), professors earn a decent salary. But what is clear, more support is needed. I’d argue that I shouldn’t be doing about 30% of the tasks I spend my time on.

 

Why I work so much

I love what I do. Doing research is my jam. I also really enjoy teaching and put a lot into my courses. Because of these loves, I do work a lot on research and teaching. These are what I consider productive work, where I fulfill the core responsibilities of my job for the university. However, the administrative side of my job has increased substantially over the past 15 years, to the point where I work a 10-hour day and have done no productive work, instead doing busy work.

 

Why this increase in administrative work? Part of the answer is increasing oversight and regulation from the provincial government. The other part is what the late David Graeber calls “bullshit jobs”. I don’t mean to denigrate perfectly well-meaning individuals who also work hard, but the massive growth in the bureaucratic staff in universities has resulted in more busy work for everyone. The bureaucracy of a university includes those that do not directly deliver a university’s mission but have power to institute procedures and policies that affect those that provide the mission. Bureaucratic units, according to Graeber, gain power and momentum by growing in size, creating more procedures, and making themselves necessary.

 

Beyond this, are the emails. Oh, the emails. I get 150-230 emails a day. As I write this post, I have 8,411 unread emails. And this is after I marked all emails as read that were received before last November. I get daily review requests, queries from prospective graduate students, and journals asking me to write manuscripts for them. My university also does most of its paperwork by emailing pdfs, which has a high error rate (e.g., students not getting paid, visa letters not being sent to visiting researchers, etc.), requiring more time to fix things. So, my solution is to basically ignore many emails. It would take at least half of every workday to simply reply to the emails sent to me.

 

What are the solutions?

Obviously, this workload is not sustainable. But what can be done? Well, I’m not willing to reduce my commitment to teaching and research. So, either I continue to work 60 hours a week, or I try to cut back on other demands. But I already say no daily.

 

Institutionally, the university can do much better. My job contract specifies 40% teaching, 40% research, and 20% administration. But I work more like 40-40-50. One solution is that I track my administrative hours, and my department charges bureaucratic units for my time beyond the 20% (which should be 8 hours a week). This money could then be used to hire administrative support for professors.

 

Regardless of the mechanism, more support needs to be provided to professors. I recently travelled to Germany for a research meeting and not once did the professor deal with any logistics of my visit. Instead, it was an administrative person embedded in the research group that dealt with everything. It would be amazing if I did not need to fill out doodle polls every day to organize meetings, or handle routine paperwork. I could be so much more impactful at delivering the university’s mission. This is especially needed for those of us running large research groups and laboratories, which comes with a lot of administrative stuff.

 

Final thought

This post is not meant to be an exercise in complaining. Rather, its about the effective and efficient delivery of our teaching and research duties. Professors doing administration for administration’s sake is a waste of taxpayer money. More than this, I hear from junior faculty about how stressed they are and that there are too many administrative hurdles and too much paperwork. This is about protecting people and their mental health. People who got into this business to have impact through their research and teaching. And that promise of impact is being taken away from them.