News & Views item

Science Plays 20-Questions with President Obama's Scientific Advisor. (December 29, 2010)

Shortly before Christmas Science's Eli Kintisch stopped by the office of the advisor to President Barack Obama for Science and Technology, the Director of the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy, and Co-Chair of the President’s Council of Advisors on Science and Technology (PCAST), John Holdren, and put a series of 20 questions to him.

Q: What metrics do you find useful in tracking the nation's scientific performance?

J.H.: We try to track all the metrics that we can, and we also try to spend some time thinking of better ones. There are input metrics like, "How much money are you spending on R&D?", "How many scientists are you graduating?" You look at patents, you look at publications, and you look at rates of improvement of different performance. That is, you look at rates of improvement in energy efficiency. You look at rates of improvement in the capacity to control emissions in cost-effective ways. ...

The ones that get the most attention from the public are, "How do your kids do in international standardized tests?" How much money are you spending? How many kids are you graduating?" ... We're still doing very well in many fields, and indeed we lead the world in many fields. At the same time, there are a lot of fields in which it makes great sense to make common cause and cooperate internationally rather than competing. Big science is one example.

J.H.: In the domain we've been talking about here, energy and climate, we have not been able to do as much as we had hoped. There are a number of reasons for that, including the unexpected and numerous crises that ended up taking a lot of the time and energy of people in the Administration, and the fact that the health care issue took so much more time and proved so much more difficult than expected. It didn't leave a lot of time to develop the consensus to try to get through [Congress] something like [energy]. ...

With the composition of the new Congress, we're unlikely to get the kind of legislation we were seeking in the last one, which really does everything as one big package and gets a cap-and-trade approach or another approach to putting a price on carbon. So we're going to have to do a lot of other things.

Q: How well are you balancing the outreach side of your job, such as giving talks and reaching out to scientists, with the inside part, getting the agencies to work together on science policy?

J.H.: Within the "inward" side, there are a number of functions: On one hand, my job and OSTP's job is to make sure the president and his senior advisers have the inputs from science and technology that bear on the decisions they're dealing with, ... and the other side is the policy for science and technology, including the budgets for research and development, what we need to do for STEM [science, technology, engineering, and mathematics] education, and what we need to do in terms of scientific workforce issues. ...

Another balance is [between] strategic thinking and crisis response. That is, how much of your time do you spend responding to things that have to be dealt with right now versus thinking about how we are doing and which direction we should be going as a country in terms of science and technology.

Q: So how are you doing on these various tasks?

J.H.: I think on the balance of inward versus outward, it largely takes care of itself in the sense that when the president needs to know more about something, that's what you do. Your highest priority is making sure that the president has the information he needs to make the choices he needs to make. ... Whatever has to be postponed or reduced gets postponed or reduced so that you have the time and resources to advise the president. ...

You only do the external stuff—meeting with the community, for example—as it is consistent with those other obligations.

Q: In that speech, the president said he was "restoring science to its rightful place." Do you think scientists are playing a more influential role in this Administration than in the previous one?

J.H.: I don't like to get into the business of invidious comparisons with the previous Administration if I can help it. I was a vocal critic of the previous Administration's treatment of science and technology. I thought that Jack Marburger [science adviser and OSTP director under President George W. Bush] didn't have enough access to the president but that the reason was that the president didn't have much interest in science and technology. He had other preoccupations, obviously. And at the same time I think that Jack got a lot done quietly and often below the radar screen. ...

J.H.: The first surprise was the breadth of OSTP's activities in domains which, despite my previous experience with OSTP as a member of the White House, I was not fully aware of. For example, OSTP has much larger responsibilities in the national security domain than I had been aware of, even though I had all the [security] clearances before. ... The national security-defense challenges alone could occupy you full-time. We have several people in recent months who have been spending time on rare earth elements. So the range is incredible. Another was OSTP's responsibilities in regards to NASA and NSF, ... and I was quite surprised at how much time I interacted with those agencies.

Q What's your proudest achievement on science or technology in the first 2 years?

J.H.: It's a tie for first with the budgets we've gotten for science and technology and the initiatives we've been able to launch in STEM education, including Educate to Innovate, which features such remarkable participation from the private and philanthropic sectors. I think that effort, which now includes the Change the Equation initiative with the participation of 100 CEOs, is really going to have an impact.