Toward the end of Richard Nixon's first term as president, his Republican administration forced on a reluctant National Science Foundation (NSF) a major research program that looked like something out of a New Deal social laboratory. Research Applied to National Needs (RANN) was more ambitious than any program NSF had undertaken before or has undertaken since. Between 1971 and 1977, it spent almost a half billion dollars to fund research projects that were far-reaching, innovative, and targeted. Ironically, Jimmy Carter's Democratic administration, with Frank Press as science adviser and Richard Atkinson as NSF director, killed it without regret.
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