The spin-up of a new administration allows scientists a great opportunity. They can cast off their shackles, reduce the deficit, increase productivity, and set the country pointing toward the shining city on the hill of technological supremacy and scientific leadership.

How? Easy. Get the government off their backs.

The fact is that virtually every successful academic scientist is a ward of the federal government. One cannot do the research necessary to publish enough to be awarded tenure without appealing to one or another agency for considerable financial support.

In the environmental sciences, the amount necessary to build such a research machine in time to get tenure (six years) is around $1 million. This requires no mean amount of supplication and obedience to, say, the National Aeronautics and Space Administration, the Environmental Protection Agency, the Department of Energy, or the National Science Foundation.

If anyone truly believes that those agencies do not have political agenda, they need look no further than "public choice" economic theory. They exist to perpetuate themselves, and to expand their territory and their political influence. Government agencies behave just like people.

The agency goals cannot be accomplished without the largesse of Congress. Thus begins a peculiar back-scratching in which political patrons define a particular problem as The Most Important in History. The agency responds by testifying that the end is near unless a few billion is spent pronto—and then it probably will be even worse than we thought.

Such issues and constituencies include the ozone "hole" (NASA, NSF, EPA); global warming (NASA, NSF, DOE, EPA); sexually transmitted diseases (National Institutes of Health, NSF); or roughage shortages (NIH, U.S. Department of Agriculture). The list is as infinite as is the predilection for Homo sapiens to have nightmares.

All this is well and good for agencies, but horribly destructive of science. For the most progress in science is made when researchers challenge existing paradigms, the most overarching of which is that we are doomed. But don't expect agency heads to march up to the Senate's Subcommittee on Science, Space, and Technology and say that, well, global warming isn't much of a problem after all, so maybe we ought to be investigating how it might create a better world.

Heck no. That's the province of industry, and industry has as much of a vested interest in funding research based upon that hypothesis as the government does in promoting the apocalypse.

But the amount of funding that industry tenders toward basic research on the environment is minuscule, and is viewed as "tainted" by a community whose primary source of funding is designed to prove that things are Terrible and getting worse.

So here's how to change things, save money and promote scientific progress:

The Clinton administration should provide an enhanced tax incentive for the support of basic research by industry. Every research dollar provided by industry should be met by a consequent reduction in federal support.

The result will be that scientists will no longer be required to shill for the apocalypse in order to keep their jobs. Government has its agenda (more government) as surely as industry has its: more industry. Both are biased, self-serving entities.

Scientists should be allowed, or even encouraged, to choose between biases in their choice of funding. Right now, they have no choice. As a result, the diversity of opinion and contention that is required for scientific progress is being stifled by a government hell-bent on promoting itself.

Now it would be easy to blame the government for getting us into this mess in the first place, but in fact it didn't. Rather, industry abdicated.

Government got into big science first with the Manhattan Project on nuclear fission—an explosive success. Then, the socialization of science became institutionalized with the panic response to the launching of the Soviet Sputnik in 1957. Industry saw these developments as a great way to get support of basic science off its own back.

And so it did. Now, industry reaps the whirlwind: excessive regulation and economic miasma, because we're about to centrally plan the world's energy economy based on the threat of global warming. This threat can rather easily be diminished by close inspection of the facts—something that all those agencies that are getting oh-so-fat are not about to trumpet and promote.

So, there you have it, Mr. Clinton. Reduce federal spending on basic science as much as industry will compensate for it; encourage industry with tax incentives. Scientists operating and benefiting from a free market of ideas, rather than government command-and-control, will help get you out of the regulatory mess that had to result when gov- ernment took over science.

What you will get, Mr. Clinton, is a diverse, rejuvenated scientific community that divides equally between the worried and the optimistic. Parity between those groups will enhance the dynamic tension necessary for scientific progress. And because the United States has more good scientists than any nation in history, it's a sure shot that you'll be credited with the greatest explosion ever of scientific progress.