ABSTRACT
Federal funding of science means federal control of the content of science. This control may take the form of politically inspired constraints on what scientists may do; it may take the somewhat less offensive form of micromanagement; it may simply be the result of priorities and choices made by career administrators, by the administration, and by congressional committees. One of the types of control considered is "benign" in the sense that it is intended to bend the course of science in some direction believed to be good. Respondents to Engler and Martino's survey agreed that the tendency to judge science and scientists by political norms rather than by scientific norms is increasing. The National Academy of Sciences' Committee on Solar and Space Physics prepared a set of recommendations of federally funded research on the sun, the solar wind, the upper atmosphere, and the magnetospheres of the earth and other planets.
