ABSTRACT

For many who care about the quality of technical advice guiding national policy, the model of effective advising seems to remain the President's Science Advisory Committee (PSAC) of the 1950s and 1960s. The Department of Defense, for example, has a small army of analysts of unquestionable competence in matters of technical detail continuously under contract. PSAC today would be distinguished by the quality of its individual members and by its independence, but no longer by the kind of questions it posed or the way it went about analyzing them. PSAC cannot any longer serve as the paradigm of how to get good science advice into government. For the community of scientists committed to good science in government, therefore, the issue is not access, but authority: how does the scientific community at large arrive at and express a "consensus" technical judgment to stand against false claims?