Dan Vergano at USA Today has done a piece about congressman Adrian Smith's attempt--which we're now calling "citizen Googling" here at "The Intersection"--to involve members of the public in determining which peer-reviewed NSF grants are a "waste." Vergano sets the endeavor in the context of misguided attacks on government research that go all the way back to Sen. William Proxmire's infamous "Golden Fleece" awards. As Vergano notes, it pretty much always seems that when some politician slams a government scientific grant, the research actually turns out to be quite important and the pol is simply misinterpreting its meaning. (Hmmm, I wonder why that is?) Sure enough, that already appears to be the case with the two grants picked out by Smith. As Vergano reports:
So, as you might expect, when we asked the National Science Foundation about the two grants that Smith mentioned, we learned a little more about them. ...
