Social Science Space

Even if Congress and the president succeed in breaking the logjam and approve the remaining fiscal year 2019 appropriations bills, the new Congress will find itself significantly behind schedule in the fiscal year 2020 budget and appropriations cycle. The president’s budget, which is usually delivered to Congress in early February, will likely be delayed by a month, and perhaps longer if another partial shutdown occurs on February 16. House and Senate appropriations committees typically set deadlines for requests by this time in the year, but that process is not even close to starting because of the shutdown.

During this U.S government partial shutdown, agencies including the NSF, the Fish and Wildlife Service, the National Parks Service, the U.S. Geological Survey, the Environmental Protection Agency, the National Institute of Standards and Technology and NOAA have had to stop most work. Surely that can’t be beneficial …

The House and Senate failed to enact appropriations legislation to fund several federal departments and agencies, and, as a result, the federal government experienced a partial government shutdown effective December 22. But there has been some action – the Senate confirmed the nominations of Kelvin Droegemeier as director of the Office of Science and Technology Policy and Steven Dillingham as director of the U.S. Census Bureau.

The threat by Donald Trump to shutdown the U.S. federal government if he doesn’t see funding for a border wall could delay the 2019 budget for the National Science Foundation, a budget that is expected to include an increase in funding for NSF relative to the current year. Meanwhile, the president has named five new people to the National Science Board,.

When the National Science Foundation tabbed Arthur “Skip” Lupia to head its Directorate for Social, Behavioral, and Economic Sciences (SBE), it was making a statement whether it meant to or not. Lupia, officially the Hal R. Varian Collegiate Professor of Political Science at the University of Michigan, has been one of social science’s ablest defenders — and occasional critics.

Making its largest-ever grant in the social sciences and humanities, the Wolfson Foundation awarded the British Academy £10 million to promote high quality research. Under the initiative, the British Academy will create a fellowship program to support early career researchers, develop an international community of scholars and create an intellectual hub at the academy’s London home on Carlton House Terrace.

Predatory publications are different from mainstream journals because they charge exorbitant fees to publish the articles they solicit, and they don’t follow any of the quality assurance processes expected in academic publication. Academics in the developing world have become a favorite target for these journals, and many seem to be falling into the trap. We need to ask why.

U.S. government-funded research that on its face looked only at fame, names and gender turned out to be pioneering work into implicit bias. This year a Golden Goose Award went to three researchers who developed the concept of implicit bias and then made a huge impact on popular culture by giving the world a test to measure it.

The Coalition for National Science Funding hosted a webinar titled “Communicating the Value of NSF to Elected Officials”; Focusing on the need to engage with elected officials while they’re at home in their district. An issue of importance as US Government continues to go back and forth on its funding for the next fiscal year.

Both houses of the United States Congress have appropriations bills that increase funding for the National Science Foundation and the 2020 Census in the works, and ‘regular order’ is still the rule for seeing them advance to passage. But how long will regular order be regular?

Arbitrary choices –all those political considerations that twist and constrain scholarship without adding to it in intellectually meaningful ways — are rife in contemporary academic sociology, says our Daniel Nehring. Tired of trying to pointlessly argue against them in hopes they disappear, he asks that we make these choices explicit and visible.

Funding for basic research, visas for scholars from outside the United States, and streamlining regulations that get in the way of research are areas of concern for a consortium of business and academic interests that annually reviews the state of American government’s commitment to innovation.