What, exactly, would a Department of Science do?
Lets see… a nation ruled by the brightest scientists…
Dear God, shoot me first.
Uh, and just look at how badly the Krypton Science Council botched up running things, eh?
As tomndebb implies, a Secretary of Science might feel inclined to make official, seal-of-approval pronouncements (“life clearly begins no later than the moment of conception” or “There’s certainly lots of evidence of Intelligent Design in the universe” or “Evolution is still just a theory”) which would then become the justification for policy.
No thanks, we get enough of that from on high as it is.
I don’t suggest that a Dept. of Sci. should hire scientists, or make scientific announcements. Does the Dept. of Industry run factories? Does the Dept. of Agriculture grow crops? If you want, you can call it the “Department of Metascience” - it’ll deal with science as a field, not any specific project.
To recap, a DoS (or DoE&S) will have the following roles:
- Funding academic research.
- Advising the President on scientific matters.
- Encouraging scientific study in schools and among the general public.
- Coordinating scientific reseach among the different branches of government, and avoiding waste.
- Coordinating between scientists in the private, public and academic sectors.
- Promoting U.S. scientific interests abroad.
- Fighting pseudoscience and general ignorance (wishful thinking, here.)
Science is as a national resource, as important as agriculture and industry. If they deserve departments, so does it.
The United States does not have a Department of Industry.
Most of the functions you speak of are already handled by the National Science Foundation and the President’s Science Advisor. I see no reason why we should combine these two entities and promote them to a Cabinet-level office.
Also, I worry about “avoiding waste”. Scientific research, even when it is duplicative, is almost never wasteful. Even a complete replication of a prior study is beneficial to science; the results will validate the prior study, illuminate methodological or theoretical errors in the prior study, or expose some thing that the prior study missed entirely. However, just try getting someone who is out to “eliminate waste” to fund a replicate study. Bureaucrats rarely understand science, and creating a bureaucracy to regulate scientific research like this is bound to make things worse, not better.
About the only thing that we need more of is crossdiscipline communication (i.e. population biologists talking to fluid dynamicists). And I doubt that a bureaucratic hierarchy will help with this. “You can’t talk to him, he’s over in Life Sciences and we don’t do that.”
Really? Darn. Didn’t know that.
I also overlooked the ubiquitous American Distrust of Government (DoG?). I’ll have to think about the issue a bit more.
Alessan, I don’t think the opposition seen here is a result of American DoG, though that is a real phenomenon. Instead, I think, it is a recognition of the nature of science. Furthermore, I don’t think it is an example of DoG to note that governmental agencies attempt to regulate their area of responsibility - that’s simply the point of governmental agencies. Whether that’s good or bad in general is another question; it’s definitely bad in science.
But as for your points.
**1. Funding academic research. **
Already done, through NIH, NES, CDC, DoD, NASA, DOI, DOE, and others. I don’t think that the creation of a DoS would cause an increase in funding.
**2. Advising the President on scientific matters. **
Already have a Science Advisor, with a staff.
**3. Encouraging scientific study in schools and among the general public. **
Already done.
4. Coordinating scientific reseach among the different branches of government, and avoiding waste.
Adopting KellyM’s points, and adding that there is a near-invisible line between “coordinating” and “directing”
**5. Coordinating between scientists in the private, public and academic sectors. **
See #4.
**6. Promoting U.S. scientific interests abroad. **
Not sure what you mean by this.
**7. Fighting pseudoscience and general ignorance (wishful thinking, here.) **
Probably wishful thinking. In any event, fighting pseudoscience would probably really piss off the folks involved in the War on Drugs. 
Further, we already have the DoEducation, which presumably does this.
Sua
We’ve already covered the Dept. of Industry (we call it the Ministry of Plenty ;] ). And the U.S. Department of Agriculture pays people to not grow crops.