This paper traces the evolving relationship between scientists and their public sponsors in one sector. In 1975, the US Congress enacted the “Famine Prevention and Freedom from Hunger” Amendment to the Foreign Assistance Act, known as Title XII in the international development community. Title XII envisioned mobilizing the scientific expertise of US land grant universities to build a partnership with USAID to improve agricultural development assistance, prevent famine, and end hunger. Title XII had great expectations for the application of science for solving the food and nutrition problems of developing countries. Scientists during the 1980s were largely left to do their science under the supervision of a technical officer. With the neo-liberal debasing of public institutions, contracting officers began to look into the work of researchers, changing the contracting mechanism from grants to cooperative agreements with increasing powers of oversight and control. Consequently, USAID-funded land grant university research programs increased the budgetary line item for monitoring and evaluation (as distinct from scientific research validation). At first, researchers took this bureaucratic incursion into their affairs quite lightly. In the 1990s, M&E functions became increasingly rigorous, increasing the time and effort expended. However, scientists had a difficult time taking these data collection efforts seriously. USAID M&E stressed reliability so that aggregation could occur across projects and countries to a world scale. Ultimately, the validity of these global indicators was questioned. Indeed, what could they possible mean? Considerable back-and-forth debate occurred between USAID M&E aggregators and the scientists on the ground. Overtime the reliability of the indicators, through better item formulation and increased supervision of data collection, has increased. Unfortunately, in a climate of rising expectations, the scale of the impacts indicated in the numbers based on research projects was not nearly as impressive as those from full-scale development projects. How could USAID project managers tell the story better to Congress? Economists stepped up to translate and demonstrate impact through modeling. While addressing the bottom line of value for investment, such accountability becomes a reductionist science that, while satisfying the ‘bean-counters’, misses the point. With the global food crisis of 2008, budgets for USAID sponsored research and education projects have increased, albeit with foreshortened time horizons. Nevertheless, questions concerning the meaning and validity of accountability indicators still reached congressional decision makers. Consequently, USAID project managers have expanded their arsenal to convincing them of the value of the scientific advances being made. Communicating the human impact of science through success stories has become a growth industry and communication line items of research budgets have responded. The final discussion reflects on this experience with respect to the perspectives of Busch (1992), Sumberg et al (2012), and the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine (2016).
