National Science Foundation

NATIONAL SCIENCE FOUNDATION

NATIONAL SCIENCE FOUNDATION. The National Science Foundation (NSF), a federal agency that subsidizes scientific research and education, was created in 1950 after several years of debate over the proper organization of national science policy. Vannevar Bush, the head of the wartime Office of Scientific Research and Development, and the West Virginia Senator Harley Kilgore both felt that an extensive federal commitment to scientific research would ensure postwar prosperity and military strength. But Bush wanted to keep control of the new agency in the hands of leading scientists, fearing that any incursion on the self-organization of researchers would jeopardize their results, while the populist Kilgore argued that the government should direct research toward pressing social and economic issues, retain ownership of patents, and redistribute resources away from the top northeastern schools.

Bush originally gained the upper hand with an influential 1945 report entitled Science—The Endless Frontier and worked out a compromise bill with Kilgore in the spring of 1946. But some prominent scientists protested that government support of science was socialistic, while others chafed at the elitist and militaristic focus of the proposed agency. Meanwhile, army and navy leaders wanted to gain control of military research for themselves. Congress managed to pass a research bill in 1947 despite such opposition, but President Harry S. Truman vetoed it, probably because he was suspicious of Bush's drive to give experts so much freedom from government oversight.

The National Science Foundation Act of 1950 applied a strict budget cap of $15 million and authorized an initial allocation of only $225,000. The organization's scope was also limited, as the expanded National Institutes of Health (NIH) and new agencies such as the Office of Naval Research, the Research and Development Board, and the Atomic Energy Commission had captured important areas of research while NSF supporters fought among themselves. Nor could the NSF support the social sciences, which Kilgore had hoped to include. The budget cap was lifted in 1953, but annual expenditures remained in the low tens of millions until the Soviet launch of the Sputnik satellite in 1957 drew Americans' attention to the nation's scientific capacities. The NSF appropriation jumped to $134 million in 1959 and reached almost half a billion dollars by the end of the 1960s.

Despite its slow start, the NSF came to play a critical role in funding basic research in the nation's universities. In the mid-1990s, for example, the NSF provided nearly a quarter of the government's support for university research, though its research budget was only 3 percent of total federal research spending—far smaller than the shares of the Department of Defense, the NIH, and the National Aeronautics and Space Administration. The agency's mission has also expanded since its inception. Congress changed its charter in 1968 to include applied research and the social sciences, and President Richard M. Nixon actively pushed the agency in this direction. Engineering was added in 1986, reflecting a new desire to spur industrial growth in the face of overseas competition. President Bill Clinton redoubled this industrial emphasis after 1993, but the NSF soon became embroiled in a broad debate over the role of the state, as a new class of Republican congressmen sought to reduce the size of the federal government.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

England, J. Merton. A Patron for Pure Science: The National Science Foundation's Formative Years, 1945–1957. Washington, D.C.: National Science Foundation, 1983.

Leslie, Stuart W. The Cold War and American Science: The Military-Industrial-Academic Complex at MIT and Stanford. New York: Columbia University Press, 1993.

Smith, Bruce L. R. American Science Policy since World War II. Washington, D.C.: Brookings Institution, 1990.

Wang, Jessica. "Liberals, the Progressive Left, and the Political Economy of Postwar American Science: The National Science Foundation Debate Revisited." Historical Studies in the Physical and Biological Sciences 26 (Fall 1995): 139–166.

Andrew Jewett

See also Office of Scientific Research and Development .