I hadn’t realised that Coburn’s amendment is not the only effort in recent history to defund the social sciences. From a correspondent’s email (with hyperlinks re-arranged slightly):
In the spring of ’06 Kay Bailey Hutchison “promoted the idea”:http://www.asanet.org/cs/root/leftnav/advocacy/social_sciences_under_attack of cutting all social-science funding from NSF, and “briefly introduced legislation”:http://www.cossa.org/volume25/25.10.htm.
In 1995, during Gingrich’s high tide, the House Budget Committee endorsed a no-social-science bill:
And there was a similar round in ’81.
Work by political scientists (including the unimpeachably right-of-center “Timothy Groseclose”:http://www.questia.com/PM.qst?a=o&se=gglsc&d=96524420 ) suggests that politics in Congress crucially depends on the swapping of favors, legislative concessions etc. In this spirit, I would like to suggest a compromise to Senator Coburn’s office – that funding for political science be retained as is, but be supplemented by an entirely new budget line, to be entitled the Coburn Research Assistance Program. This would be specifically devoted to the investigation of social-scientific hypotheses proposed by Senator Coburn and those of his Senatorial colleagues whom he feels qualified to help out. The first grant could go e.g. towards an investigation of whether having more than one girl using the school restroom at a time is empirically associated with “an increased propensity towards lesbianism”:http://www.alternet.org/rights/20162/. An experimental design would seem the obvious way to study this – there might be difficulty in getting this through the human subjects review board (and some – shock horror – might find the underlying insinuations about ‘the gay problem’ to be offensive) , but with enough political will …