This article will serve as a scratchpad for research on this topic; it may be updated periodically with more information as I come across it.

Hunches

I haven't read the book yet, but I have two hunches about the author's approach to the problem:

(1) My guess is that the author (Chris Mooney) will pursue the old classic socialist tactic of conflating opposition to the government doing X with opposition to X. As Bastiat put it, way back in 1850:

... every time we object to a thing being done by government, the socialists conclude that we object to its being done at all. We disapprove of state education. Then the socialists say that we are opposed to any education. We object to a state religion. Then the socialists say that we want no religion at all. We object to a state-enforced equality. Then they say that we are against equality. And so on, and so on. It is as if the socialists were to accuse us of not wanting persons to eat because we do not want the state to raise grain.

In this case, I suspect we will see Republican refusals to have the government fund this or that -- or allowing voters to decide what gets funded rather than "experts" -- as opposition to science.

(2) I suspect the author will employ circular arguments, presuming that major scientific debates of our day -- e.g. human contributions to global warming -- have already been decided in favor of "leftist" views, and then characterizing a failure to agree with those conclusions as opposition to "science" itself, as though "science" was a dogmatic set of conclusions, not an investigative technique with room for various factions to draw differing conclusions from incomplete data.

(3) Scientists are human beings -- economic and political animals, in some sense -- like the rest of us. Like everyone, they can tempted, corrupted, and act more out of self-interest than dispassionate interest in the truth. For example, I sometimes the suspect the reason there is so much push to have the government fund embryonic stem cell research is precisely because it so little likely commerical application.

(Think about it: if it were really something which was on the verge of promising miracles, why aren't there droves of investors lined up to fund it? Why are the all the scientific proponents lobbying Congress with their hands out?)

Following on #2, I expect the author will portray even politically-active scientists -- those undoubtedly most likely to receive the taxpayer's hard-earned dollar -- as impartial abiters, pitted against scientifically ignorant politicians; especially those of a conservative persuasion.

Closure of the Office of Technology Assessment (OTA)

Cooked Timber:

One of the key moments in Mooney’s story – the tragedy of modern science policy – was the decision of the Gingrich Congress to get rid of Congress’s Office of Technology Assessment (OTA), which provided impartial assessments of scientific issues that had policy implications in the 1990s. As Mooney documents, there were a number of reasons for this. The Congress claimed to want to cut down on ‘government waste;’ getting rid of OTA was a cheap way to demonstrate their commitment to doing this.... But the key problem, in the eyes of Gingrich Republicans, was that its reports were often politically inconvenient. OTA had made a number of enemies during the Reagan era, by issuing reports which reflected the scientific consensus on the “Star Wars” program of missile defence – that it was unworkable, and stood a significant chance of “catastrophic failure.” That these claims were true did little to endear them to Star Wars’ defenders. The result was that some Republicans began to see OTA as an enemy stronghold. Mooney’s account makes it clear that this wasn’t an universal perception among Republicans – one moderate Republican congressman mounted a defence of OTA that might well have succeeded. Unfortunately, this last-ditch initiative failed.

There are three things worth pointing out here.

(1) As far as I understand it, whether Reagan's so-called "Star Wars" defense system was workable or not, according to the science of the time, was utterly irrelvant. As far as I understood it, SDI ("Star Wars") was simply part of subterfuge to goad the Soviet Union into massive military counter-spending, and ultimately trigger its collapse.

(2) Regardless of where the science stood (regarding SDI) it sounds like a legitimate case could be made that the OTA failed to take even minimal steps to avoid the appearance of a conflict of interest:

The list of participants for the OTA Workshop indicates little effort by OTA to draw together a truly balanced group of perspectives on space-related issues. The Chairman, McGeorge Bundy, has stated that "The Star Wars speech is one of the most irresponsible and destructive utterances that a President has made in the nuclear age"--hardly the model for an objective Chairman; the other 24 participants were heavily weighted toward critics or skeptics of strategic defense. At least nine of the non-OTA staff participants have been publicly critical of the SDI...

The chairman of a "unbiased" OTA committee to evaluate SDI was already known to have said suggesting it was "one of the most irresponsible and destructive utterances that a President has made in the nuclear age"?

Besides the obvious bias that statement betrays, it also shows how foolish the man making it was. Whatever scientific knowledge he may have had, let's note Bundy's statement was a political one, since he claimed expertise in international relations -- an area where Bundy had no more authority or expertise than I. This is an example of the false authority fallacy, and suggests that Bundy could not distinguish between his own supposed area of expertise and areas in which he had no special knowledge.

Somehow, I don't get the feeling Mooney will be letting his readers know this salient little detail; it would tend to look like the OTA was either grossly incompetant at detecting obvious bias, or even preferred a stacked deck.

This is funny, because I've cited obvious OTA bias on the very case Mooney chose to imply the OTA was acting in an unbiased manner.

(3) Consider this -- that essentially, the reason OTA was eliminated wasn't that Republicans (and Democrats who agreed) were all against science, but rather that the service it provided was arguably redundant:

... some background in terms of the Office of Technology Assessment. In 1995 on a bipartisan level, we eliminated it, and the belief at that time was that there were other committees that we could turn to to get technology studies and technology assessment. Some of these, for example, are the National Academy of Sciences, the National Academy of Engineering, the Institute of Medicine, and the National Research Council. All of them have hundreds of people who are technically educated. And then in addition to that, there are 3,273 people at the General Accounting Office and 729 at the Congressional Research Service. We have not suffered because of the loss of technology assessment. It is perhaps true that we could rearrange some of the food on the plate and make sure that it does not get shuffled to the back burner; but if my colleagues think about it, Mr. Chairman, we actually have thousands of people out there doing studies, and we just need to make sure that this does not fall through the cracks. As a result of eliminating the Office of Technology Assessment, we have saved $274 million, which is serious money in tight budget times, and that is money that we can put into many other worthy causes...

And again I would ask, is the role of Congress to decide the great scientific questions of our day? Are the people we put there even capable of doing that? Or is the role of Congress rather to carry out the will of the voters, such that scientists (and other would-be beneficiaries) would first have to make an argument to the electorate before funding or policy materialized?

I would rather have them be scientifically "wrong"* and keep our democracy, than be scientifically "right" but hand our government over to an unelected cadre of the beknighted scientific elite.

[* So often, what is scientifically "wrong" in one era turns out, just a generation later, to have been right. And vise-versa. In the 1970's the prevailing scientific consensus is that we were facing a serious problem from global cooling. Imagine if that had been codified into public policy!]