Our Founding Fathers were patrons and practitioners of science. As chronicled by Tom Shachtman in Gentleman Scientists and Revolutionaries, Benjamin Franklin became the nation's first internationally recognized scientist through experiments with electricity. Washington, despite skeptics, demanded that American troops be vaccinated against smallpox. Jefferson was a polymath who collected weather observations daily, founded American paleontology, and, with Washington, experimented with scientific farming. Madison sought principles of government through historical research, and Adams founded the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. For the Founders, scientific thinking was the gift of the Enlightenment - a way to leave superstition behind. The scientific method even provided a vehicle for finding the best way to govern. As Shachtman notes, the Declaration of Independence was framed as an evidence-based argument, and our Constitutional system was seen from the outset as an "experiment."
A healthy relationship between science and government is not a given, however. As a candidate, President Trump questioned vaccination, suggesting that too much vaccine at a time could cause autism. He debunks climate science, and his EPA chief, Scott Pruitt, speaking about the impact of human activity on climate said: "I would not agree that it's a primary contributor to the global warming that we see." The President's Press Secretary, Sean Spicer, to head off the impact of the Congressional Budget Office's scoring of the GOP's health care bill said "If you're looking to the C.B.O. for accuracy, you're looking in the wrong place." When the report was released, Health and Human Services Secretary Tom Price pronounced the work of its economists as "just not believable." In his first budget, the president proposes cutting 18 percent from the National Institutes for Health, all climate science research, and nearly 20 percent from the Department of Energy's Office of Science, whose labs focus on basic research.
When government leaders diminish the value of science, they can find acceptance among three sets of ears. First are those who believe that some scientists, such as climate researchers, are part of a conspiracy aimed at foisting their beliefs on the public. Second are those who don't understand the scientific method so that what the misconstrue, they mistrust. Third are those who think the federal government can't afford science.
A conspiracy, especially on science cutting across national boundaries, is so difficult as to be impossible. Science on any given topic is conducted by thousands of researchers in hundreds of universities and labs all over the world. Any result seeking a published, wider audience must survive the scrutiny of peer review and then is still subject to the test of whether its findings can be replicated, a test eagerly taken up by anyone seeking to disprove them. A conspiracy would thus require the coordinated collusion of literally thousands of universities, funding sources, journals, and scientists themselves - who by temperament bristle against anyone telling them what to do.
Science is easily misunderstood. Science education in schools is often poor, and many scientists and science journalists are either unwilling or ineffective at helping the public understand what science says. For example, the temperature on a given day is useless in drawing conclusions about climate. So, when Sen. James Inhofe brought a snowball into Congress to dismiss global warming, he was either disingenuous or scientifically naive. Yet to many he seemed believable. As another example, the scientific method does not speak in certainties. Findings are expressed as probabilities, since it is usually impossible to rule out every other explanatory variable. The fact that economists' projections are not always exactly correct, then, is not a reason to dismiss them. It is to realize that, while imperfect, they are still better than the alternative, which is to make wild guesses based on political passions - or to eschew projections at all.
The argument that we cannot afford research assumes it is either unnecessary or that someone else will pay for it. Thousands of discoveries disprove the first contention, and a misunderstanding disproves the second. While the federal government cannot pay for all science, it is uniquely positioned to support basic research. The private sector focuses on science with near-time commercial prospects, but government must fill the gap by supporting research that lacks immediately obvious benefits.
As the founders of our nation understood, scientists need government for both financial and moral support, but government also needs science for the betterment of the citizenry. When the partnership between science and government flourishes, such as in medical research, developing energy resources, building infrastructure, crop improvement, predicting or ameliorating natural disasters, and ensuring safe methods of transportation, Americans are the beneficiaries. Where science is ignored or demeaned, we put emotion and ideology, not reason, in charge of our affairs.
In March 1797, Thomas Jefferson became the president of the American Philosophical Society (APS), at the time the nation's pre-eminent scientific organization (started by Benjamin Franklin in 1743). Jefferson served as president through his term as vice-president and two terms as president of the United States. He turned to the APS to support the Lewis and Clark expedition. He saw the collaboration of science and government as consistent with his belief in the "illimitable freedom of the human mind." That's the spirit in which science and government should find themselves allied.