Washington

The White House Office of Management and Budget (OMB) has unveiled its long-awaited criteria for evaluating basic research supported by the US government.

Research organizations had worried that the criteria would force agencies to quantify the output of basic research programmes and so would damage high-risk projects (see Nature 413, 5; 2001).

At a meeting at the National Academy of Sciences in Washington on 27 February, OMB officials said that basic research will be measured by three criteria: the quality of the research, its relevance to the funding agency, and its performance based on defined goals and measures.

They added that research programmes should be reviewed every three to five years, and that each agency should set appropriate standards against which its overall research performance can be assessed annually. These measures have yet to be set, and it remains unclear how they will influence agencies' future budgets.

Mitch Daniels, director of the OMB, told the meeting that he was strongly committed to the criteria for basic science. “Even in this most speculative area of government investment, our decisions cannot be immune from standards and quality,” he said.

The meeting did manage to provide some assurance that the process will be managed carefully. “The nervousness people had was that this was some kind of ideological juggernaut,” says David Goldston, chief of staff for the science committee in the House of Representatives. “One of the things the OMB did at the meeting was to put that to rest.”

But concerns remain. Mildred Dresselhaus, a professor of electrical engineering at the Massachussetts Institute of Technology, warned the meeting that the OMB's calls for regular reports might hurt areas of research that flounder for years before succeeding. “How will we incorporate failure into the criteria?” she asked.

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