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Rep. Lamar Smith, the Texas Republican who chairs the House science committee, said last week he plans to retire after three decades in Congress.
Smith is one of the most vocal skeptics of global warming in Congress. He also hasn't made many fans among academics with his proposals to cut funding for social science research at the National Science Foundation.
In 2015, he introduced legislation to require that each new announcement of a grant award from the agency be accompanied by a non-technical statement explaining how it served the public interest -- a clear attempt, social science advocates said, to make winning grants more difficult.
Before that, he offered amendments to redirect NSF's funding for social science research to the physical sciences. Smith's scrutiny of NSF funding decisions included a barrage of demands for the agency's chief to provide documents on specific projects, inquiries that were not well received by his Democratic colleagues on the science committee.
