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Dueling Reports on NSF and the Social Sciences

Here are two reports from the Senate that have been in the news, but may not be preserved by GPO or any library. As noted here earlier, “GPO does not typically catalog majority or minority reports unless it is a joint effort within a committee.”

Back in April, Senator Tom Coburn (R-OK) released a report that he called “the first comprehensive overview of NSF.”

Among other things, the report recommended the elimination NSF’s Social, Behavioral, and Economics Directorate, which funds social science research.

In July, Democratic staff of the House Committee on Science, Space, and Technology released a report that criticized Senator Coburn’s report.

Last month, a Senate committee decided not to cut funding of the social sciences at the NSF.

For background on the above two reports, see:

  • Social Science, Spared Again, by Ken Prewitt, Ken Prewitt, President of The Consortium of Social Science Associations (COSSA), and professor at the School of International and Public Affairs at Columbia University, Science Magazine (August 5, 2011).

CC BY-NC-SA 4.0 This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.


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