Reagan budget-cutting campaign

Have you ever a ridiculous question, because everybody has at some time or other. Have you ever happened to spill or push a vegetable from your plate on to the tablecloth? This happened some time ago to a friend of mine who did it with spinach.

Did he take a napkin and try to swab it up? Did he pour salt on it and rub it in the wound? He did not. He is an alert and responsible citizen. He sent a postcard to the government printing office in Washington and they responded promptly with a small but handsome pamphlet, for free, entitled, 'How to remove spinach stains from tablecloth'.

I'd better say at once that the United States government printing office is, without any remote competitor, the most completely equipped printing establishment and the biggest publisher on earth. It has an enormous staff of printers, proof readers, photo engravers, binders and the rest working on over 400 presses of various sorts. Obviously every conceivable sort of government document is printed there, from the Congressional record, which is the sort of handsome report of the debates in the House and the Senate and the reports of all the investigating and standing committees and a fat weekly of everything the president has done and said, from speeches to boy scouts, breakfast meetings, executive orders, press conferences and so on.

Obviously every conceivable sort of government document is printed there but it also prints and binds and sells and carries in stock more than a hundred million copies of something like 150,000 different publications. Would you like to know for free how to dress your doll? How to make a kitchen table? Or ice-cream? How to file the books in your library? How to grow hybrid corn? Or perhaps you have an urge for a pamphlet on the mating habits of Polish cockroaches or understanding your mother-in-law? Conquering insomnia?

All this and much more, from the causes of backaches to the history of baseball or labour unions or Chinese-American relations and a thousand more nuggets of knowledge, can be yours for the cost of a postcard or a telephone call to one department of the printing office which must be easily the largest publication distributor in the world. It's called the public documents division.

Plainly, there's no excuse for an American citizen to plead ignorance about how the internal combustion engine works, how and why Labor Day started as a national holiday or who has scored more homers than any other baseball player.

It was from the government printing office that I acquired the best short history of American agriculture and a compendium of labour statistics showing that the workforce of barbers – what are now called hair stylists in the United States – is considerably larger than the union-organised steel workers, and many other adjuncts to knowledge, including a priceless, free pamphlet called 'Infant Care'. That one is still, I believe, the all-time bestseller having sold, to date, something over 100 million copies.

I think the most surprising thing about the public documents division of the government printing office is that so few Americans seem to know about it. They may know it's there but they don't seem to use it because they have no idea, I think, of its enormous range and, incidentally, of the old-fashioned speed and courtesy with which it does its work.

Well, Mr Reagan has been looking over the government printing office as he's been looking over every other department of the government that requires money for its upkeep. That is needlessly repetitive – just say every other government department. It has to trim its budget and its ambitions and, for the moment, he's imposed a moratorium on the production of all new pamphlets, brochures, films and audio-visual aids; naturally they have been mushrooming during the past 20 years.

This is being done while officials of the budget bureau go over the whole roster of the printing office's publications and decide what is essential, what is useful and what is frivolous and, at the same time, Mr Reagan's budget boys have taken a baleful look at the social scientists and the economists and the sociologists and the psychologists on the government payroll, asking is all this basic research necessary on how people act the way they do? How money moves and grow and gets lost? How does poverty affect health or/and crime rates, so on?

Understandably, the men wielding the budget axe, congressmen especially, are hot for thrift, point to what look like the more absurd, knotty, psychological experiments. The National Science Foundation, for instance, has a project paid for by the federal government, quote, 'to explore gender differences between men and women'. This doesn't amuse a Republican congressman from Ohio so much as alarm him. He sees it as the opening wedge or the vanguard or the spark plug or some other metaphor to 'set the stage for social engineering and government intervention,' unquote.

I, myself, find it an intellectual strain to see how government is going to intervene, short of a public scandal, in exploring gender differences between men and women, but this congressman seems to know about it and he's one angry man.

Not as angry, however, as the sociologists and psychologists on the staffs of the alcohol, drug abuse and mental health administration. For years now, conservative politicians of both parties have been riffling through the work of these august bodies and fastening on federal grants given to researchers for work on human and animal behaviour. One senator has made a point of making a monthly golden fleece award to what he considers piddling research projects that most effectively fleece the government of its money. The Polish cockroach study would, I imagine, have been a certain winner.

But what the researchers themselves say is that such people overlook the valuable body of their work – studies of social conditions or genetics or both – that provide the breeding ground for mental illness. They point out that it's not going to help to provide money for the treatment of rape victims and withhold money for studying the causes and prevention of rape. The National Science Foundation has been told to reduce its research grants for sociological and economics research from 500 a year to about 140.

The Reagan men say that they can see the point, the necessity, of backing research in chemistry and physics and neurology but they don't want the federal government shelling out money to have people study why people age or get divorced or how and why new attitudes to the working wife and the single parent have come about. The sociologists, I must say, have had a long heyday in this country. It appears to be fading.

Now this whole argument, if it were not linked to the Reagan budget-cutting campaign, could be argued rationally, deeply and usefully if it were the subject of, say, a presidential commission. It's certainly important enough for that but it's being argued in Washington, in the White House, in the government agencies that are threatened and, sadly and inevitably, it's being drastically, and perhaps fatally, oversimplified on both sides.

It is surely too simple, for instance, for young Mr Stockman, the director of the Office of Management and Budget, the man with the big axe, to say he thinks that social research is 'of lower value to society than such other sciences as chemistry and physics'. This remark shows a woeful ignorance of the whole point and the mystery of basic research and I don't think I can do better than recall an example I gave when President Nixon expressed a similar impatience with the money going out for basic research and said, in effect, 'more of it ought to go on the great crusade to conquer cancer'.

Now the snag here is that a man saying, 'I'm doing cancer research' is not necessarily going to make a cancer discovery or one more vital than that of a man who's working on something else which turns out to be central to a cancer cure. We all know about Fleming pondering over a piece of mould, but how about that Englishman, J. Griffiths, generally unknown to fame, who acted on a hint that had been dropped a hundred years before by the Scottish physiologist, John Hunter?

Griffiths developed a peculiar fascination. He was interested in moles and hedgehogs and he noticed quite by chance that their prostate glands changed size in summer and winter. A decade or two later, a couple of Frenchmen found they could produce this change by injecting moles with female hormones. It took two Germans, a Welshman and the discovery of something called phosphatase before an American, Charles Huggins, in Chicago, working on dogs, tinkered around with male and female sex hormones, found he could control the tumours of the dogs and ,26 years later, was given the Nobel Prize for having discovered a way of treating cancer of the prostate in men.

Nobody in his right mind in the 1880s, or for that matter nobody in the Reagan administration of the 1980s, would dream of giving a research grant to a man who came along and said, 'I'm interested in the seasonal cycle of the hedgehog'. No doubt the congressman from Ohio would have picked on that gentleman as yet another absurd example of government waste in scientific research.

To make the argument worse, a lobbyist for the psychologists has angrily declared, 'that Darwin, Marx and Freud are critics of the Reaganite view of how the world was made, how it works and how we work in it and psychologists, sociologists and economists are their heirs, the empirical left who challenge the faith-based values of the creationists, the moral majority, the laissez-faire industrialists, the militarists, the coalition who put Reagan in office', unquote.

The time will come, maybe has come, when this passionate lobbyist will wish he'd eaten his words before he spewed them. By labelling all sociologists, economists, psychologists in the government employ 'Darwinians, Marxists and Freudians', he has certainly delivered his brothers into the hands of the Lord – the lord and master of us all – the president. The administration should now have a much easier time wielding the axe on everybody, except the scientists whose results you can touch and see now.

In the meantime, better write at once to the government printing office! It soon may be too late to learn how to take spinach stains out of your tablecloth.

This transcript was typed from a recording of the original BBC broadcast (© BBC) and not copied from an original script. Because of the risk of mishearing, the BBC cannot vouch for its complete accuracy.

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