AIP FYI #5: Strengthening NSF’s Prioritization Process for Large Facilities

In order to strengthen the National Science Foundation’s procedures
for prioritizing, approving, funding, and constructing major
research facilities and equipment, a committee of the National
Research Council recommends that NSF should seek greater involvement
of the science community to develop a clearer, more transparent set
of criteria for large facility projects, prepare a 10-20 year
roadmap to guide the funding and construction of such facilities,
and implement external as well as internal oversight of projects.
“Large-research-facility projects have become too complex,
expensive, and numerous to handle with procedures that may have
sufficed in the past,” the Committee on Setting Priorities for
NSF-Sponsored Large Research Facility Projects says in its report.
In addition, the committee found that “a number of concerns have
been expressed by policy-makers and researchers about the process
used to rank large-research-facility projects for funding,”
including a backlog of approved but unfunded projects, selection
criteria that “have not been clearly and publicly articulated,” and
a lack of funding for idea-generation, conceptual development,
planning and design activities.

Such concerns over NSF’s ability to manage projects in its Major
Research Equipment and Facilities Construction (MREFC) account
prompted Senators Barbara Mikulski (D-MD), Christopher Bond (R-MO),
Ernest Hollings (D-SC), John McCain (R-AZ), Edward Kennedy (D-MA),
and Judd Gregg (R-NH) to call on the National Academies to review
NSF’s large-facility prioritization process, a request that was also
included in the 2002 NSF Authorization Act. Based upon its review,
the committee “concluded that although NSF has improved its process
for setting priorities among large-facility projects, further
strengthening is needed, if NSF is to meet the demands that will be
made of it in the future.”

The committee’s primary recommendation is that, with oversight by
the National Science Board (NSB) and substantial input from the
science community, NSF produce a roadmap ranking large facility
projects being considered for construction within 10-20 years, which
would be used in the preparation of annual budget requests and
revised every three to five years. The committee proposes that NSF
use a three-tiered bottom-up system of criteria for project
prioritization: scientific and technical merit criteria should guide
project rankings within a field; agency strategic criteria, such as
balance across fields and potential to impact several fields, should
guide rankings across related fields; and national criteria, such as
U.S. leadership in key fields and workforce education and training,
should guide rankings across all fields. At the January 14 release
of the report, committee chairman William Brinkman of Princeton
University emphasized that S&T quality must be at the core of all
the criteria, that projects currently under construction must
receive a high priority, and that, as the roadmap would be a dynamic
document and budget projections are likely to change from year to
year, a project’s appearance on the roadmap was not a guarantee of
funding. He reported that the committee consulted closely with OSTP
Director John Marburger during its deliberations, and was briefed by
DOE Office of Science Director Ray Orbach on his efforts to develop
a 20-year facilities roadmap for large DOE science projects.

Additionally, the committee recommended that NSF enhance project
pre-approval planning and budgeting; that each project be reviewed
by both internal and external experts; that OSTP have an early role
in coordinating roadmaps across S&T agencies and with other
countries, and that, given congressional interest in this issue, NSF
and NSB “give careful attention to the implementation of reforms in
the MREFC account.” The committee’s report lays out a six-step
process to implement its recommendations.

The report, “Setting Priorities for Large Research Facility Projects
Supported by the National Science Foundation,” is currently
available in prepublication form at the following web site:
http://www7.nationalacademies.org/NSF-Priorities/. The body of the
report runs approximately 32 pages.

As the facilities required for many fields of science become
increasingly sophisticated and expensive, policymakers are
recognizing a greater need for prioritization and coordination
across disciplines, across federal agencies, and even
internationally. Within OSTP, “we’re asking…how do we start to
make sense of this bigger picture?” reported an OSTP official to a
scientific advisory committee last summer. He warned that, without
such coordinated planning, “we are in danger of saturating our
available budgets with low priority, redundant, and uncoordinated
activities” (see FYI #106, 2003).

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Audrey T. Leath

Media and Government Relations Division

The American Institute of Physics

fyi@aip.org www.aip.org/gov

(301) 209-3094

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