BY MICHAEL S. JOHNSON

I’ve been observing the genitalia of ducks for several years now. Did you know, the female duck has an anatomical part similar to a cork screw that acts as a deterrent to male ducks the female is not interested in, uh, screwing?

Well, I should clarify that statement.

I really haven’t been studying the under carriage of ducks. Patricia Brennan has on my behalf and yours. She’s a professor at the University of Massachusetts who studies duck sex under what has become an 8-year project under a $384,000 (what we presume to be an annual) grant from the National Science Foundation (NSF), which you and I support with our tax dollars.

I found out about our research in the Washington Post, which reported that our tax dollars are also being spent to build a robotic squirrel and make shrimp run on a treadmill.  We’re also looking into why bluebirds are blue. We’re doing the research “because the biggest advances in thinking come from the strangest places,” according to Reporter David Farenthold. He wrote that the government studying duck sex is not about the money, but what he called the “moral choices embedded in the federal budget.”

Really? That is a legitimate moral question?

You run across similar stories often, about bizarre research projects funded by the taxpayers to study prairie grass in Iowa or mouse droppings in urban areas. They are nothing new and if we weren’t in a fiscal crisis, they would probably be overlooked. But we are, unfortunately, in a situation where nothing can be overlooked and everything has to be put into some kind of spending perspective. The National Science Foundation is now a $7 billion monument to basic research. We should be deciding what among its projects and programs are essential government and what isn’t. So I thought we ought to spread the feathers a little wider and take a second look at duck genitalia.

Professor Brennan’s defense of her research has been sometimes reasoned and sometimes laced with pseudo-intellectual arrogance and academic elitism. “Genitalia, dear readers, are where the rubber meets the road, evolutionarily,” she wrote earlier in Slate.

Professor Brennan argues that those of us who question government research grants may not be knowledgeable enough to understand the difference between basic and applied science, or fully appreciate the benefits to mankind that sometimes result.

The professor explained that the female duck’s evolved vaginal morphology makes it difficult for males to inseminate females close to the sites of fertilization and sperm storage.

“…Generating new knowledge of what facts affect genital morphology in ducks, one of the few vertebrate species other than humans that form pair bonds and exhibit violent sexual coercion, may have significant applied uses in the future, but we must conduct the basic research first,” Brennan explained.

We may have significant applied uses in the future? Well, I feel better. But it’s been eight years.

I would concede that the funding of research into duck sex or robotic squirrels or the blue in bluebirds or getting shrimp to run on treadmills may have future potential in terms of scientific discovery. I am sure the Science Foundation gets far more requests for funding than it gives out, so the decision makers do apply priorities and see some value in what they fund.

The problem is that Science Foundation priorities are clearly not assessed in the context of broader federal government priorities. They are only being assessed in the context of NSF priorities.

Brennan is correct that we don’t understand science as well as she does. She is, after all, a scientist. But you would think a scientific mind would be able to deduce the relative importance of any given scientific grant project to the limitations of government resources and current public priorities.

Her understanding of science may be Ivy League, but her understanding of politics, which, like science, is essentially another form of decision-making, is bush league.

Basic scientific research is one of thousands of public pursuits that have to be weighed by fiscal, political, moral, economic, and social, priorities.

We are in a fiscal crisis, forced to cut health care for the elderly, reduce pre-school programs for poor kids, cut food stamps and unemployment benefits to people who are having difficulty feeding their families. We are also increasing taxes on middle class working Americans, and standing by while our educational system deteriorates. We have reduced ourselves to the desperation and embarrassment of mindless and indiscriminate sequestering of funds for federal programs.

And science? We should be putting more funding into disease prevention. We could solve our Medicare problems by curing Alzheimer’s and diabetes. The research we need in flu prevention and biological warfare are critical. We need better solutions to nuclear waste storage and the application of technology in national infrastructure from roads to electric grids. We need to reignite the space program.

I’m not particularly well educated. I’ve only seen Harvard and Princeton from the highway; however, I do understand the difference between basic and applied science, and I do appreciate the advancements that have come from government labs, particularly the ones in space.

But that’s not what this discussion is all about. It is about government at a far more fundamental level of decision-making. It is taking us back to some basics about what a democratic Republic is expected to do for the people and what the people are expected to do for themselves.

So I know I speak for the ducks involved in all of that research when I say, quack, quack.

Next, Part 2:  the essence of essential government.

Editor’s Note: Mike Johnson is a former journalist, who worked on the Ford White House staff and served as press secretary and chief of staff to House Republican Leader Bob Michel, prior to entering the private sector. He is co-author of a book, Surviving Congress, a guide for congressional staff. He is currently a principal with the OB-C Group.