Recent events in Congress suggest the attacks on funding will not only continue but will intensify. It is also worth remembering that these attacks are just the latest in a long standing effort by conservatives to eliminate funding for social science.
Congress just cut funding for political science because they don’t understand the good it does. Here are four excellent examples.
As a political scientist, I find it curious that my discipline has been singled out as being particularly wasteful of federal research dollars. How did we join welfare queens and spotted owls as convenient punching bags, things that must not be aided by taxpayer money during lean times?
Everyone has experience being human, and so findings in social science coincide with something that we have either experienced or can imagine experiencing. The result is that social science all too often seems like common sense.
Recently, the US House of Representatives passed off an amendment offered by Representative Jeff Flake (R-AZ) that would prohibit funding for the Political Science Program with the National Science Foundation. If enacted into law, this amendment would set an extraordinary and disturbing precedent in which Congress chooses which scientific disciplines should be funded and not funded within the NSF’s research portfolio.
