The election is upon us, and we all look forward to it being over. Both presidential candidates have stated their positions with regard to science, e.g., in response to Science Debate 2008, not always with equal clarity.

Many thoughtful individuals and organizations have offered their advice to the incoming president and posted specific proposals for early action, including the immediate appointment of the President’s Science Advisor (naming him or her Assistant to the President for Science and Technology, thus reporting directly to the President). Indeed there is urgency in making this appointment, since the Science Advisor will be critically important in helping the President select and recruit a large number of presidential appointments as agency heads and for other vital roles. But, the list of things that need to be done right away is long, most of them the result of failed policies of the outgoing administration.

The new president will be under enormous pressure to focus his time, energy and political chits on the immediate crises and “put on hold” serious attention to important strategic issues that will affect the country decades into the future.

One such issue is the need for increased federal funding for research — in all fields of science, mathematics, engineering — and for STEM education, as advocated by the National Academies’ “Gathering Storm” report and the “America Competes Act”, signed into law by President Bush. The agencies that support research — NSF, NIH, NIST, DOE’s Office of Science, NASA, NOAA, USGS and others — are all in some degree of serious trouble. And the researchers in universities, medical schools, and national laboratories share that pain.

The problem is particularly serious for early-career researchers, including a “talent bubble” of super-bright women and men living on soft money. The recent American Academy of Arts and Sciences report, ARISE (Advancing Research in Science and Engineering), presents the data and offers recommendations to agencies, universities and private foundations on how to deal with the situation and, at the same time, give more attention to high-risk, potentially transformational research proposals, often submitted by young researchers. If our country fails to support the ‘stars of the future,’ it won’t have much of a future for our grand kids to look forward to. The President will need to hear from the community about moving these issues, and others on all our lists, higher up the priority list for action. But how will that happen?

Here’s my concern. The level of interest and active involvement by the science community in this year’s campaign has been amazing — thousands of “civic scientists” showing how much they care, not just about the future of American science but about America itself.

I hope that in the future, the involvement of the community will continue to build on that momentum. But, whatever happens, we must avoid an understandable inclination to hunker down in our disciplinary fox holes and forget about the big science picture. If we do that, we all will lose and the nation will be ill-served. The NIH (National Institutes of Health) doubling did not, for the most part, come from dollars that otherwise would have been spent on physics, astronomy, mathematics, chemistry, engineering or other fields. Nor did the last six years of cuts in the NIH budget provide significant dollars for other research fields. That is not how priorities get traded off in the appropriations process, where the NIH is in a different bill from the NSF, which is in a different bill from the DOE, and so forth.

So, we should feel completely comfortable advocating for larger budgets for any and all of these and other science agencies without worrying that our field will lose money. Let’s see if, for the first time in the recent history of our country, we can come together as a community and make the arguments for the whole as well as its parts. Our professional science societies and other interested organizations will be critical in showing the leadership — through partnership — to make that happen. They will need your encouragement.