“There’s something disturbing that in order to get a lot done in that area they feel they have to hire a big Washington establishment figure and find people inside the agency who know the otherwise impenetrable corridors,” Cato’s Olson said. “It also works to the detriment of someone who has a great idea but not a Washington budget.”

Olson also thinks the standards argued by groups like Public Citizen create an impossible choice, one he says is reminiscent of the dilemma faced by Stendhal’s hero in the “Red and the Black”– in which at a young age, ambitious, middle-class strivers must pick either the church or the army.


“You can either choose to deal with influencing the federal government, or you can choose to influence the world, but choose at age 21,” he joked. “Do you force people to be mandarins and never sully their hands and never launch a thing, or totally be on the profitable side and never contribute usefully to how the regulatory process should be structured?”

“You’ve got lots of biases in both directions,” he said, “and somehow you have to sort through the biases in a way that does not deny the fact that scientific talent is scarce and you can’t write off 99 percent of it.”

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