July 7, 1992 United States House of Representatives Congressman George Brown (D-CA) Speech begins on Congressional Record page H6234
The SPEAKER pro tempore. Under a previous order of the House, the gentleman from California [Mr. BROWN] is recognized for 60 minutes.
Mr. BROWN. Madam Speaker, 3 weeks ago, the House voted to terminate the superconducting super collider [SSC], which by the end of the decade promises to be the world's largest, most expensive, and in all likelihood most productive scientific facility. Whether the House's action will hold up in the Senate, or through conference, is at this moment uncertain. But we do know that an effort will be made to revive the SSC in the other body and that there is a very good chance that Members of the House-come September-will have another opportunity to vote on the question of whether the SSC should be built.
I am speaking on this issue today in anticipation of that future vote. When it comes, it will be essential for the Members of the House to have a clear understanding of the implications of termination of the SSC not only on high-energy physics, but also on this Nation's leadership in science and technology, on our future economic performance, and ultimately on our vision of ourselves.
I hope that, when that second vote comes, Members will consider the fact that abandoning our pursuit of the next frontier in high-energy physics would in fact be a monumental decision. I can think of no comparable situation in which the United States-or indeed human society-consciously decided that it could not afford the next level of understanding in a premier field of science. The urge to pursue knowledge is an unharnessable one; ultimately, if we turn our backs on the next frontier, others will take up the quest.
I make this plea because, although the June 17 floor debate on the SSC was far reaching, the overriding issue in that debate was a simple one: money. The SSC vote followed within a week of an emotional and extended debate on the balanced budget amendment. Many Members were highly receptive to the opportunity to eliminate funding for a large, visible project-especially one with benefits perceived to be regional rather than national. In my mind, it was the coincidence of these circumstances which explains why 78 Members-nearly 20 percent of those voting-changed from SSC supporters in 1991 to SSC opponents 1 year later.
The SSC, although expensive, was a solid, well-managed program in 1991. The Department of Energy's cost estimate for completing the project has not changed by 1 penny over the past 18 months. The record shows that in 1992, the SSC is still a solid, well-managed program-expensive but worth the investment. In short, nothing of substance has changed in the management of the project over the past year to explain a switch of 78 votes.
Today, in laying the groundwork for a second vote on the SSC in the House later this section, I would like to review the costs and benefits, and the criticisms and justifications, of this project. If we vote on the SSC again this year, we should do so based on a clear understanding of both costs and benefits. The costs-billions of tax dollars, potentially deferred opportunities in other scientific fields-are easy to understand. The benefits-international prestige, pushing the frontiers of basic research-are more nebulous and ephemeral. That, however, does not make them any less important.
In reviewing the floor debate of June 17, I found that there were three basic criticisms of the project:
First, the SSC is a low-priority science and technology project.
Second, the construction of the SSC is being mismanaged by the Department of Energy and its contractors.
Third, we simply cannot afford the SSC.
I would like to review each of these issues in turn, focusing ultimately on the importance and benefits of fundamental research of the type represented by the SSC to U.S. economic and political leadership.
IS THE SSC LOW-PRIORITY SCIENCE?
During the June 17 debate, many Members argued that the funding demands of the SSC are such that they will squeeze out many diverse and important scientific projects, including other worthwhile efforts in high-energy physics. This is a legitimate concern, and one that I expressed myself on the floor in a colloquy with Mr. BEVILL, the chairman of the Energy and Water Development Subcommittee.
In the end, however, I was convicted the risk was worth taking.
The history of high-energy physics in one of fundamental and startling discoveries made possible by a progression of larger and more powerful particle accelerators. As each new generation of accelerators is built, the older accelerators become obsolete. This is the nature of the fields; this is how progress is made. If the SSC is ultimately built, and if 10 years from now the mix of high-energy physics facilities is different than it is today, we should consider it a sign of progress, and certainly not a cause for alarm.
In the short term, will funding for the SSC, in fact, squeeze out funding for other scientific projects that have higher priority? This is a very difficult question to answer, since each Member will have his or her own set of priorities. For some, the top priority might be health research; for others, research into renewable energy or environmental technologies; for others, the SSC.
But in any discussion of priorities, we must remember one crucial fact. Any money that is saved by terminating the SSC will not necessarily flow to other scientific projects, regardless of whether they are high or low priority. In fact, despite rhetoric to the contrary, terminating the SSC may not even lead to deficit reduction. Because of the nature of the appropriations process, it is just as likely that any SSC savings will be expended on nonscientific programs such as water development. Good public policy would seem to dictate that, rather than considering each project piecemeal, the Congress should decide upon the overall funding level and on the mix of projects that comprise our total science and technology portfolio. We probably should weigh projects like the SSC against possible increases in funding for cancer research or critical technology development. But we don't operate that way. We operate through individual appropriations bills, of which at least six deal extensively with matters related to science and technology. And in the system we have, there is no guarantee that money saved from the SSC will go to higher priority science. It is just as likely that money saved from the SSC will only serve to reduce the overall level of funding that science and technology receive.
What about the narrower question of whether the SSC is high- priority physics? On this question, the record is clearer. The executive board of the American Physical Society strongly confirmed its support of the SSC after the House vote. In addition, there are many non-physicists who understand the importance of the breakthroughs that the SSC will foster. Robert Galvin, chairman of Motorola, has stated that:
The SSC, by providing energies 20 times greater than any previous accelerators, permits nuclear collisions that examine very small distances and thus magnifies twenty-fold our ability to look at the most basic interactions of matter. There is no other way to reach such small dimensions with adequate intensity in the laboratory than by building the SSC. It will provide a tremendous advance in scientific understanding of natural laws.
What about the contention that by disrupting funding for smaller projects, the SSC will, in the words of the Washington Post, "leave physics weaker rather than stronger in this country"? The best answer to this question comes from the high-energy physics community itself, which was asked by the Department of Energy to lay out programs for United States high-energy physics through the 1990's under several budget scenarios. Under all budget guidelines, the High Energy Physics Advisory Panel [HEPAP] said that the SSC was central to a forward-looking physics program:
In all our plans, we consider construction of the SSC to have the highest priority in the U.S. particle physics program and to be absolutely essential for continued progress in our field into the 21st century. The energy and luminosity of the SSC will provide a unique opportunity to answer some of the most fundamental questions about the structure of matter.
It is appropriate that we in the Congress do our best to set priorities for science and technology in a system which does not permit easy comparisons or trade-offs. But as we do, we should remember that the SSC's strong support from within the Nation's high-energy physics community is no accident, but the result of a very difficult and protracted priority-setting exercise within that community itself. We should also remember that a vote against the SSC does not by itself set scientific priorities; rather, it sacrifices a science project to politics in the name of fiscal responsibility, with no assurance that the elimination of that project will in fact ease funding pressure elsewhere in the research budget.
IS THE SSC MISMANAGED?
During the floor debate, there were charges that the SSC is being mismanaged by the Department of Energy and its contractors. Many of these charges were based on investigative work carried out over the past 1-1/2- years by the Investigations and Oversight Subcommittee of the Committee on Science, Space, and Technology. As chairman of the Science Committee, I strongly support a vigorous Investigations and Oversight Subcommittee, and I salute the hard and probing work that the chairman of the subcommittee, Mr. WOLPE, and the ranking Republican member, Mr. BOEHLERT, have done on this and on other issues. Strong congressional oversight is essential on programs like the SSC. Without it, public trust in our $70 billion annual Federal R&D investment would be minimal.
In reviewing the record, it would seem that all the charges of mismanagement essentially boil down to two basic contentions. First, the Department of Energy has consistently low-balled its estimates of project costs. Too, even today, the project cost and claims are not believable. What is the evidence to support each of these charges?
There is evidence to support the contention that project costs have consistently escalated over the past 5 years. But some of the claims of cost overruns are in themselves wildly exaggerated. A reading of the floor debate would lead one to believe that the cost of the SSC has escalated from less than $4 billion to more than $11 billion in the past 5 years. In fact, the first serious estimate of the SSC's cost was made in 1988. That estimate-$5.3 billion in as spent dollars-is about $3 billion less than the current estimate of $8.25 billion. Some of the cost growth since 1988 is legitimate and excusable; some is not. In the excusable category, we should recall three factors. First, the $5.3 billion estimate was not site specific or design specific.
Second, since the $5.3 billion estimate was made, full annual appropriations have not been provided by the Congress, a factor which stretches the time of construction and therefore the cost of the project.
Third, to provide greater reliability and to enhance the level of experimentation possible, the SSC underwent a significant redesign in 1990.
These are all mitigating and legitimate reasons for changing the cost estimate. Removing these factors, I would estimate that the degree of cost overruns in this project is on the order of 20 to 25 percent over the last 4 years. These are matters for concern, but they are not, in and of themselves, evidence of severe mismanagement. The level of overruns over the past 18 months is zero.
An issue related to the question of overall project cost is the extent to which foreign contributions may offset Federal obligations. I agree with many that the Department has been overly optimistic about foreign contributions for at least 5 years. It is in fact for this reason that on June 17, Mr. WALKER and I offered-and the House adopted-an amendment that would tie SSC appropriations to certification by the President of substantial foreign commitments. I stated then that the SSC is affordable and worthwhile, but only if a substantial amount of the total project cost is defrayed by State and foreign contributions. This requirement for foreign participation was also a key component of the SSC authorization bill which passed the House in 1990.
What about the second charge of mismanagement-that even today claims about the project's total cost are not believable? Much of this case rests on a statement contained in a letter written in January this year by Assistant Secretary of Energy W. Henson Moore, who complained to the project manager that "...the overrun problems are continuing or may even be getting worse."
The letter in question refers not to the entire project, but to the work of the architect/engineering contractor on the project. It refers to problems that are now 6 to 12 months old. According to the Secretary of Energy these problems did occur but have been corrected by a number of means, including a reduction of contractor staff.
These are not easy matters to resolve. According to the Secretary of Energy, the contractor is now working within budget and schedule. According to the project's critics, the system employed to track project cost and schedule is insufficiently sensitive to make this determination. Where does the truth lie? The best guidance probably comes from an examination of representative contracts. On that score the project's record is generally good. The most technically challenging components in the program-the state-of-the-art superconducting magnets-are being developed ahead of schedule. Conventional construction contracts, including tunneling, have come in below the baseline estimate. Although the project is really just beginning, and problems may yet appear-for example, in full-scale industrial production of the magnets-there do not appear to be any obvious show stoppers that would justify termination of the project.
In short, although a variety of investigations have revealed some transitory problems in program management, there is no clear evidence to date that would lead one to conclude that the project will exceed the estimated project cost of $8.25 billion.
IS THE SSC AFFORDABLE?
I have tried to restate the case that I made on the floor on June 17, that "there is only one dispute about the SSC. That dispute, pure and simple, is about money." The cutting-edge nature of the physics research that will occur at the SSC facility is undeniable. So is the wisdom of providing good jobs for our scientists and engineers at a time when defense cutbacks have eliminated many high-technology jobs. But the question remains. In light of the fact that we cannot afford everything, and therefore that we must make choices, can we afford the SSC? Or to put it another way, will our investment in the SSC pay off?
Answering this question requires a fair amount of distance and perspective. Answering this question requires an appreciation of the long-term benefits, both tangible and intangible, of basic research.
Those on both sides of the SSC issue have engaged in an often misguided debate about the specific technological advances that will or will not flow from the SSC. It is easy to debunk some of these claims. The fact is that there is no way that we can predict with any certainty how the SSC will or will not improve the economy or the quality of life of the American people in the next century. But as Nobel Laureate Leon Lederman testified before the Senate last week, the same arguments could have been raised about the work of Newton, Faraday, Maxwell, Planck, and other renowned physicists "whose pure, basic abstract research today accounts for a large part of our gross national product."
What we do know is that the scale of the SSC, and the powerful way in which it will investigate the most fundamental laws of nature, virtually guarantee that it will ultimately have a major impact on the quality of our lives. We also know that the engineering that leads to industrial improvement and productivity is based on cutting-edge science. Robert Galvin of Motorola made this case last week before the Senate. In his testimony, "The Importance of the SSC to Science, Engineering, and Economic Development," Mr. Galvin noted:
Engineering for industrial improvement is based on science. Occasionally, basic discoveries have almost immediate application to the marketplace; a good example was the discovery of the transistor in the basic research of Bardeen and Brattain. Usually, many discoveries fit together to give an increasingly profound understanding of phenomena and then the engineers use this understanding to develop practical devices. The engineers, as the problem solvers of our society, must have close connection with the scientists in order to apply scientific understanding to give useful and marketable products.
Combined with information from many other sources, the SSC will give discoveries that will set the tone for the science of the next century. The engineering of the next century will then be transformed by science just as our engineering has been.
I know that many Members are not comfortable with these rather abstract arguments about the necessity and efficacy of investments in basic research. That they are hard to quantify does not make them any less true. One day, we may have the economic tools to understand the exact relationship between investments in basic research and industrial productivity. But for now we will have to be satisfied with some extremely intriguing, albeit preliminary, studies.
Robert M. Solow won the Nobel Prize for Economics in 1987 for his work in the early fifties on the relationship between technology, innovation, and economic growth. Prior to Solow, most economic theory posited that investment of savings was the key to growth. Solow showed with statistics on wage and property income between 1909 and 1957, however, that neither capital investment nor increase in workers was the key factor in economic growth. Rather, it was a residual factor, an undefined broad category that has come to be known as innovation or technology. Solow's findings led directly to the notion that support for basic research, particularly at universities, is a key factor in generating the new knowledge which ensures continued technological innovation.
In the decades since Solow published his Nobel-winning work, a generation of economists has struggled to break down the residual technology factor to get a clearer picture of the specific processes that promote growth. There are a number of possible factors at work, including basic research, applied research, education, on-the- job training, and unstructured on-the-job learning. The work of Edwin Mansfield of the University of Pennsylvania is most noteworthy in explaining the relevance of basic research to productivity increases. Mansfield used a random sample of 76 major American firms in 7 manufacturing industries to understand both the extent to which technological innovations are based on recent academic research, and the time lags between the investment in academic research and industrial utilization of these findings. Mansfield's findings are very interesting in light of the ongoing SSC debate:
About one-tenth of the new products and processes commercialized during 1975-1985*** Could not have been developed without recent academic research. The average time lag between the conclusion of the relevant academic research and the first commercial introduction of the innovations based on this research was about 7 years. A very tentative estimate of the [annual] social rate of return from academic research during 1975-1978 is 28 percent ***.
But what does this economic research have to do with the SSC? Even if we accept the argument that technology and innovation are the keys to growth, and that basic research is a key element in technology and innovation, how do we know that the SSC is the kind of basic research that will be useful to our economy and to our society?
One answer to this question is that any research as fundamental and as high-quality as that occurring at the SSC will be useful to society simply because of the tremendous under-investment by the U.S. economy in research and development. We are well behind our economic competitors in these investments, and the trends are worsening. These are the themes that the Committee on Science, Space, and Technology emphasized in its "Views and Estimates" submission to the Budget Committee in February of this year. In that report, we made the basic point that R&D funding trends suggest a strong rationale for additional targeted investments in civilian high-technology programs.
For most of the past 10 years, defense R&D soared while Federal civilian R&D failed to keep pace with inflation. During the same period, with no coherent Federal technology policy in place, private R&D investment fell behind levels set by our competitors. Today, as a result, these competitors far outstrip the United States in percentage of GNP devoted to civilian R&D investments. As a percentage of GNP, the United States, 1.9 percent, is only investing about two-thirds as much as Japan, 3.0 percent, or Germany, 2.9 percent, on civilian R&D. Even with defense R&D included, the United States in still slightly behind Japan in total R&D expenditures as a percentage of GNP. In many high-technology industries, it is not unusual for Japanese companies to spend up to 15 percent of their profits on cutting-edge R&D-often two to three times as much as their United States counterparts.
Actually, according to two stories by Bill Broad which appeared earlier this year in the New York Times, I may even be underestimating the extent of our comparative decline in research and development. These stories highlight several disturbing trends. First, in the past 2 years, the amount of total R&D conducted in the United States has declined for the first time in over 20 years. In 1990, as a result of restructuring and recession, industrial R&D in the United States showed its biggest drop in three decades. Second, it is becoming clear that the Federal Government has been using inappropriate currency conversion rates and systematically underestimating the strength of Japan's support of industrial R&D. Using actual exchange rates between the dollar and yen, Japan-with half the population of the United State and an economy only two- thirds as large as that of the United States-is spending over $80 billion annually on industrial R&D, an amount which is larger than that spent by United States industry. In short, at a time when Japan is outspending the United States on capital investment, $586 billion versus $524 billion in 1990, it has also become the world's leading patron of industrial R&D.
It is compelling to note that this period of growing civilian R&D commitment by our competitors, which was unmatched by the United States, correlates with the decline in our industrial competitiveness. Furthermore, in those areas where U.S. R&D expenditures have remained strong, such as biotechnology, pharmaceuticals, and aeronautics, our competitive position has remained strong.
In light of the critical importance of R&D to economic growth, the Science Committee has recommended as a fundamental national goal that the total Federal R&D commitment at least maintain pace with inflation over he next 10 years. This should be done in two ways. First, tax policies should be structured so that within a decade, private R&D investment will grow sufficiently to enable our overall civilian R&D investment level to approach that of our economic competitors. Second, we should accelerate the ongoing shift of resources and personnel from defense R&D programs to civilian R&D programs. Historic trends suggest that this shift is overdue. While our civilian R&D expenditures stagnated over the past 10 years, defense R&D experienced 76-percent real growth. In 1979, the ratio of Federal defense to civilian R&D was 48:52. The ratio steadily rose to a peak of 69:31 in 1986 and has been slowly decreasing since. In fiscal year 1992, the ratio stands at 60:40, and in the President's fiscal year 1993 budget submission, despite the greatly diminished Soviet threat, the ratio drops only one additional point to 59:41. Given that the total annual Federal R&D investment is well over $70 billion, small percentage shifts from defense to civilian R&D have the potential to yield large returns in technological investment. Reversing the current 60:40 defense: civilian ratio to a 40:60 ratio would reallocate a total of $14 billion from defense R&D to civilian R&D programs.
In short, we can afford the SSC, if we consider it to be a crucial part of a long-term strategy to redress some very disturbing investment trends in the United States. If these trends are allowed to proceed unchecked, they cannot fail to eat away at our standing in a world which will be increasingly dominated by science and technology.
CONCLUSION
Madam Speaker, I would like to close this special order with a few words on the problems that we in the Congress face in dealing with big science-projects like the SSC, fusion reactors, and the space station that are increasingly controversial because of their size, their expense, and the multi-year commitment necessary to bring them to fruition. Big science facilities are not big because of pork- barrel considerations. They are large because shared, complex facilities have become essential to scientific progress in a whole range of disciplines, including astronomy, oceanography, computing, and biology, as well as physics.
If we expect to continue to be world leaders, we can not expect to revolutionize science by watching apples fall from a tree. We will need an appropriate balance of small and big science. It is mindless to oppose all big science projects simply because they are big. In doing so, we virtually guarantee that many fundamental breakthroughs in our understanding of nature will not occur in the United States. By rejecting all big science, we demonstrate that we are unable or unwilling to play the role of the steady, scientific leader in a new world order where security will be based as much on economic and technological strength as on military weaponry.
I know that in the face of huge budget deficits, it is not easy to support a program whose benefits are as uncertain and long-term as the SSC's will be. But ultimately, even if we lose our will, the scientific promise of the SSC will prove to be so intriguing that the work will be done, albeit on other shores. And when that happens, we will send the signal that we knew what a great society should do, but we lacked the will to get it done. This would be a message to the youth of America-and to the world at large-that we are a nation in decline.