Over the past several months, Congress has gotten rather upset by some of the research funded by arms of the federal government, such as the National Science Foundation and the National Institutes of Health. That displeasure eventually prompted the House Science Committee's chair, Lamar Smith (R-TX), to float a bill that would require the head of the NSF to certify that every single grant its organization funded was either in the national interest or groundbreaking.

As we pointed out, the mission of the NSF is to fund research in fundamental questions in science (typically called "basic" research). As such, the research isn't intended to have immediate commercial or military applications; those would come decades down the line, if ever. And it's generally considered impossible to predict which areas of research will eventually be viewed as groundbreaking at some point in the future.

Now, scientists who have served in the NSF are saying the same things. In a letter to Smith obtained by Science magazine, they point out that the draft bill "frankly requires the Director [of the NSF] to accurately predict the future." And they point to a technology that's currently having a huge commercial impact—the laser—that grew out of basic research using microwaves. In fact, in their view, "many basic research projects in every field supported by the NSF would likely not qualify for certification under this bill."

Meanwhile, the magazine's news arm, Science Insider has apparently gotten one of Smith's aides to talk about the reasoning behind the bill. But the explanations are not internally consistent. The source notes that the NSF funds in the area of 11,000 grants each year and suggests that there are "a few bad apples" in that number. If it's just a few bad apples out of 11,000, is Congressional intervention really required? Suddenly, the justification changes, and there are large numbers of problematic grants: "Congress is saying, 'We think an additional step is needed to solve the problem of so many questionable grants being awarded.'"

The whole idea of "questionable" grants also appears to be a value judgement of the peer-review system, but the source continues to claim that this is a separate issue and peer review is fine. In practical terms, however, there is no way that this legislation could avoid affecting peer review. There is no possible way for the NSF director to examine and certify each of those thousands of grants every year. As such, that decision will ultimately have to be pushed down to the individuals who do examine a grant in detail: the peer reviewers.

As such, any attempts to claim that this is not an attempt by Congress to inject political considerations into the peer review process seem disingenuous.