Hannah Bloch-Wehba (Texas A&M University School of Law; Yale University – Yale Information Society Project) has posted The Public Interest in Private Science on SSRN. Here is the abstract:
The federal government primarily relies on grants and contracts to fund scientific research. This arrangement emerged as a political compromise after World War II and was designed to leverage innovation and discovery in universities and the private sector while limiting opportunities for the state to exert influence over research and knowledge production. But time has shown that the contractarian architecture of US research funding often enables the executive overreach that it was designed to prevent. While the state has promised to preserve scientific autonomy, it has also used its spending authority to compel compliance with a variety of ideological and political goals. The federal government’s success at leveraging spending for political ends underscores both how fragile the “public interest” in the scientific enterprise can be and where the opportunities for political engagement may lie.
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