Enhanced Scientific Leadership and Capacity in the US Environmental Protection Agency - Science For Environmental Protection: The Road Ahead - page 168

STRENGTHENING SCIENCE IN A TIME OF TIGHT BUDGETS
This report has stressed the importance of sustaining and strengthening
EPA's present programs of scientific research, applications, and data collection
while identifying and pursuing a wide array of new scientific opportunities and
challenges. Both are needed to address the complexity of modern problems and
both are essential to the agency if it is to continue to provide scientific leader-
ship and high-quality science-based regulation in the years to come.
Specific recommendations related to agency budgets are outside the scope
of this study, but the committee feels compelled to note, as did the report Sci-
ence Advisory Board Comments on the President's Requested FY2013 Research
Budget (EPA SAB 2012a), that since 2004, the budget for ORD has declined
28.5% in real-dollar terms (gross domestic product-indexed dollars). The reduc-
tions have been even greater in a number of specific fields, such as ecosystem
research and pollution prevention.
Finding: If EPA is to provide scientific leadership and high-quality science-
based regulation in the coming decades, it will need adequate resources to do so.
Some of the committee's recommendations, if followed, will allow EPA to ad-
dress its scientific needs with greater efficiency. But the agency cannot continue
to provide leadership, pursue many new needs and opportunities, and lay the
foundation for ensuring future health and environmental safety unless the long-
term budgetary trend is reversed.
Recommendation: The committee recommends EPA create a process to set
priorities for improving the quality of its scientific endeavors over the com-
ing decades. This process should recognize the inevitably limited resources
while clearly articulating the level of resources required for the agency to
continue to ensure the future health and safety of humans and ecosystems.
SUMMARY
It is clear that if EPA is to meet current, persistent, and future challenges
and is to succeed in applying systems thinking throughout its scientific enter-
prise, it will have to continue to enhance its scientific capacity and improve co-
ordination of science throughout the agency. In this chapter, the committee has
described how EPA can enhance its agency-wide science leadership, take steps
to continue the realignment of ORD to advance transdisciplinary research and
support the agency's strategic goals, strengthen internal scientific capacity and
ties to the larger environmental science and engineering research community,
and ensure the integrity of the scientific information the agency generates or
uses.