The Office of Scientific Research and Development (OSRD) was an agency of the United States federal government created to coordinate scientific research for military purposes during World War II. Arrangements were made for its creation during May 1941, and it was created formally by Executive Order 8807 on June 28, 1941.[1][2] It superseded the work of the National Defense Research Committee (NDRC), was given almost unlimited access to funding and resources, and was directed by Vannevar Bush, who reported only to President Franklin Delano Roosevelt.
The research was widely varied, and included projects devoted to new and more accurate bombs, reliable detonators, work on the proximity fuze, guided missiles, radar and early-warning systems, lighter and more accurate hand weapons, more effective medical treatments (including work to make penicillin at scale, which was necessary for its use as a drug[3]), more versatile vehicles, and, the most secret of all, the S-1 Section, which later became the Manhattan Project and developed the first atomic weapons.
When Germany invaded Poland in September 1939, the United States possessed no significant government apparatus for mobilizing civilian science for military purposes.[4] The country's military research establishments were small, underfunded, and disconnected from the nation's leading scientists at universities and industrial laboratories.[5] The National Academy of Sciences, while authorized since 1863 to advise the government on scientific matters, lacked funds and operational capacity; its subordinate National Research Council had been largely ignored by the armed services during the interwar years.[6] The only significant exception was the National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics (NACA), established in 1915, which had developed effective working relationships between government, universities, and the aircraft industry.[4]
The scientific leaders who would create OSRD represented what historian Roger Geiger has called "a new generation of leadership in American science," one that had come of age during the fiscally constrained conditions of the 1930s.[7] Unlike their predecessors, who had insisted that private philanthropy alone should support research, this generation was open to federal funding—though determined that scientific decisions remain in the hands of scientists.[8] Many were also political conservatives who distrusted the expansion of government under the New Deal, making their willingness to create new federal agencies all the more striking.[8]
Vannevar Bush, an electrical engineer who had recently left the vice presidency of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology to become president of the Carnegie Institution of Washington, had been contemplating how to organize American science for a war he believed was coming.[9] Bush drew on his experience as chairman of NACA and discussed his ideas with colleagues including Karl Compton of MIT, James Bryant Conant of Harvard, and Frank Jewett of Bell Telephone Laboratories and the National Academy of Sciences.[10] As Conant later recalled, the group had concluded that "the military system as it existed, and as it had operated during the first war, ...would never fully produce the new instrumentalities which we would certainly need."[11]
The German conquest of Western Europe in spring 1940 forced the issue. In early June, as German armies swept through France, Bush secured a brief meeting with President Roosevelt through presidential aide Harry Hopkins.[12] Bush presented a single-page proposal for a new agency that would mobilize civilian scientists for defense research. Roosevelt approved it on the spot, writing "OK—FDR" on the document.[13] Within days, Roosevelt signed letters appointing Bush and his proposed colleagues to the new National Defense Research Committee, which came into formal existence on June 27, 1940, by order of the Council of National Defense.[14]
Establishment
The NDRC proved effective in its first year, but Bush identified three limitations that required a more powerful organization.[15] First, NDRC's authority extended only to research, not to the development and engineering work necessary to transform laboratory discoveries into usable weapons.[16] Second, while NDRC coordinated with the armed services, it lacked formal authority to ensure that its work meshed with Army and Navy requirements.[16] Third, military medical research—vital for keeping troops healthy and treating casualties—remained outside NDRC's scope.[16]
To address these limitations, Roosevelt signed Executive Order 8807 on June 28, 1941, creating the Office of Scientific Research and Development within the Office for Emergency Management of the Executive Office of the President.[17] The executive order gave the new agency broad authority to:
Advise the President on the status of scientific research relating to national defense
Coordinate federal government research relating to national defense
Serve as the center for mobilization of the scientific personnel and resources of the nation
Enter into contracts and agreements for research studies and reports
Initiate and support research requested by allies whose defense the President deemed vital to American defense[18]
Bush was named Director of OSRD and retained direct access to Roosevelt, bypassing the military chain of command.[19] The reorganized NDRC, now chaired by Conant, became one of two main operating divisions within OSRD.[20] The other was the newly created Committee on Medical Research (CMR), chaired by Alfred Newton Richards of the University of Pennsylvania, which assumed responsibility for medical and biological research.[21]
Organization
Leadership
OSRD was structured to maximize scientific autonomy while coordinating with the military services.[22] Bush, the director, reported directly to the President, with no intervening bureaucratic layers.[17] An Advisory Council, composed of the director, the chairmen of NDRC and CMR, and representatives of the Army and Navy, provided policy guidance.[23]
Following the creation of OSRD, NDRC underwent a major reorganization in December 1942.[24] The original five broad divisions were replaced by a structure of nineteen technical divisions, two panels, and two special committees, each focused on a specific class of military problems:[25]
In addition, NDRC maintained the Applied Mathematics Panel, the Applied Psychology Panel, and special committees on propagation and tropical deterioration.[26]
Committee on Medical Research
The CMR was organized into six divisions covering the major fields of military medicine:[27]
Physiological effects of high altitude, acceleration, decompression
Physiology
Blood substitutes, shock, nutrition
Chemistry
Treatment of gas casualties, insect and pest control
Malaria
Antimalarial drugs and treatment
CMR worked closely with the Division of Medical Sciences of the National Research Council, which provided expert advice through specialized subcommittees.[28]
Administrative structure
Beyond the technical divisions, OSRD maintained administrative offices for contracts and finance, personnel, field service, publications, and liaison with foreign allies.[29] At its peak in 1945, the agency employed approximately 850 full-time paid staff in Washington and an additional 650 people working part-time or without compensation, for a total of roughly 1,500 personnel.[30] This small central staff coordinated work performed by thousands of scientists and engineers at contractor facilities across the country.[30]
Operations
The contract system
OSRD's most significant organizational innovation was its systematic use of research contracts to mobilize civilian science.[31] When James Conant first learned of Bush's plans, he expected that wartime research would be organized as it had been in World War I—by constructing government laboratories and staffing them with soldier-scientists. Bush quickly corrected him: "we will write contracts with universities, research institutes and industrial laboratories."[32] The implications, Conant later wrote, were immediately apparent: this approach "portended the beginning of a new relationship between the federal government and the nation's universities."[32]
Rather than attempting to bring scientists into government or expanding military laboratories, OSRD funded research at universities, industrial firms, hospitals, and other private institutions, which retained their independence while working on government-defined problems.[33] This approach reflected both the growth in United States' industrial and university research capacities since the prior war, and the ideological preferences of OSRD's leaders, who sought to keep scientific direction in civilian hands.[8][34]
The standard OSRD contract specified a research problem, a principal investigator, a budget, and a timeline, while granting researchers substantial latitude in how they pursued the work.[35] Bush described this approach as "giving a man his head": selecting the best scientists and trusting them to find solutions.[36] Crucially, OSRD possessed both the authority and the funds to proceed on research projects "whether the armed services approved or not," a freedom that proved essential in cases where military officers were skeptical of novel approaches.[37]
Scientific autonomy
Bush organized OSRD along what he called a "pyramidal structure" designed to keep "the exercise of scientific choice in the hands of scientists, who alone were in a position to judge the merits of a given line of research."[38] Each of Bush's civilian appointees became directors of major divisions, and they in turn established specialized sections as needed. Policy, administration, and budgetary matters were handled separately from technical decisions. This decentralization allowed OSRD to adapt rapidly to changing military needs while preserving researcher autonomy.[38]
The arrangement represented a deliberate contrast with World War I, when scientists who wished to contribute had been "required, with rare exception, to accept military command procedures," with research priorities determined by officers who often dismissed civilian expertise.[39] OSRD's structure ensured that while the agency was responsive to military needs, it was not subordinate to military judgment on technical matters.[37]
Indirect cost recovery
A critical feature of OSRD contracts was compensation for "indirect costs", the institutional expenses such as facilities, equipment, and administrative support that could not be attributed to any single project.[40] OSRD operated on a principle of "no-profit, no-loss": contractors should be fully reimbursed for their costs but should not profit from war work.[41] As Bush argued, for universities to participate in the research program, OSRD had to ensure they would "break even on contracts": "Any commercial concern that did not consider overhead a part of its costs would not last long."[42]
In 1942, OSRD established an overhead policy that allowed universities to receive indirect cost payments of 50 percent of salaries charged to contracts; industrial firms received 100 percent, a distinction justified by the fact that firms, unlike universities, were subject to taxation.[43] This formula was acknowledged as a "rule of thumb" rather than a precise calculation, and even at the time was understood as potentially overcompensating some institutions while undercompensating others.[44][45]
Calculating overhead proved contentious. While direct costs could be documented precisely, indirect costs occupied what one university comptroller called "an uncomfortably gray area."[46]James Killian, MIT's chief administrator during the war, joked that leaving a university without profit or loss was a "metaphysical concept."[46] Administrators and researchers often clashed over overhead's legitimacy. Scientists tended to view indirect cost recovery as an intrusion on research dollars, while university business officers considered it essential to institutional solvency.[47]
Lacking prior exposure to government contracting, universities initially lacked standardized cost accounting procedures. OSRD audited its largest contractors to verify that payments matched actual costs. By November 1945, these audits found that approximately 51 percent of large academic and industrial contractors had received excess overhead payments, largely because the standard formulas overcompensated rapidly expanding operations. Refunds were obtained or future payments reduced. Approximately 40 percent broke even, and 9 percent had been undercompensated.[48]
For the largest contracts, OSRD negotiated institution-specific rates. MIT president Karl Compton, a member of Bush's inner circle, recognized that the Radiation Laboratory's overhead costs grew more slowly than its rapidly expanding budget. He voluntarily reduced the lab's overhead rate from 50 percent to 30 percent in 1942, and to 10 percent by 1944.[n 1] A committee of university business officers later recommended rates as low as 30 percent for contracts exceeding $2 million (equivalent to $34.9M in 2024).[49] MIT's average overhead rate for the entire war was 8.7 percent, well below the standard formula.[50] Despite the difficulties of implementation, OSRD's philosophy of overhead—estimating unavoidable shared costs while prohibiting university contractors from profiting—became a cornerstone of postwar federal science policy.[51]
Contractor selection
OSRD concentrated its funding among institutions with existing research capacity, prioritizing speed over geographic distribution or institution-building.[52] The agency's first major task was surveying the nation's scientific resources. Jewett wrote to the presidents of 725 colleges and universities requesting information about their facilities and personnel; Conant followed up with fifty leading research institutions asking about their specific capabilities.[53] From these responses, Wilson compiled a directory of institutional capabilities that guided contractor selection.[54]
The result was substantial concentration. The top ten states accounted for approximately 90 percent of OSRD spending.[52] Major recipients included MIT, Caltech, Harvard, Columbia, and the University of California, Berkeley.[52] MIT alone received over $116 million, primarily for radar development at the Radiation Laboratory.[55]
This concentration provoked criticism both during and after the war. Senator Harley Kilgore of West Virginia, a New Deal Democrat, argued that OSRD's funding model favored "big business and a handful of universities" at the expense of broader geographic and institutional participation.[56] Scientists outside the OSRD network voiced similar complaints, particularly regarding MIT's privileged position. Frank Jewett reported to Bush that he had overheard scientists on a train condemning the "immoral" large allocation to MIT "and relatively little to other institutions."[57] Bush suggested that Compton rename the Radiation Laboratory the "American University Laboratory" to make clear that it was "a cooperative university undertaking instead of an MIT undertaking."[58]
These complaints reflected a tension between concentrating wartime scentific resources for maximum effectiveness and distributing them for broader institutional development that prefigured later debates on the same subject.[59] Indeed, historian Larry Owens has argued that OSRD's very success proved "counterproductive" to Bush's hopes for postwar science: decentralized contracting relationships that enabled rapid mobilization took on lives of their own, fueling the proliferation of military-academic partnerships that Bush had hoped to coordinate under unified civilian oversight.[60]
Patents
OSRD developed two standard forms of patent agreement.[61] Under the "long form," contractors retained title to inventions but granted the government a royalty-free license for governmental purposes. Under the "short form," used primarily with firms that had substantial preexisting patent portfolios in relevant fields, the government took title.[62] The policy aimed to provide sufficient incentive for contractor participation while ensuring the government could use inventions for defense purposes.[63]
Budget and finances
OSRD received funding from three sources: direct appropriations from Congress, transfers from the Army and Navy, and allocations from the President's emergency fund.[64]
OSRD Funding by Source and Fiscal Year ($USD '000)[64]
Fiscal Year
Allocations
Transfers
Appropriations
Total
1941
4,597
1,585
—
6,182
1942
3,865
35,782
—
39,647
1943
—
31,329
111,084
142,413
1944
2,618
30,313
129,583
162,514
1945
2,783
66,130
98,560
167,473
1946*
6,585
11,269
—
17,854
Total
20,450
176,408
339,226
536,084
*Through June 30, 1946.
Of the total $536 million obligated, approximately $11.1 million (2 percent) was used for administrative expenses; the remainder funded research contracts and related activities.[64] Major program expenditures included approximately $24.7 million for medical research through CMR, $13 million for atomic energy research (before transfer to the Manhattan Project in 1943), and $26.4 million for the proximity fuze program (Section T).[65] In 2024 dollars, OSRD's total expenditure of $536 million would be equivalent to approximately 9.4 billion, representing a substantial but focused investment in military technology.
Notes
↑As it grew, the Radiation Laboratory constructed dedicated buildings separate from MIT's main campus and funded its own administration and auxiliary staffing.
Gruber, Carol (1995). "The Overhead System in Government-Sponsored Academic Science: Origins and Early Development". Historical Studies in the Physical and Biological Sciences. 25 (2): 241–268. doi:10.2307/27757745. JSTOR27757745.
Kevles, Daniel J. (1975). "Scientists, the Military, and the Control of Postwar Defense Research: The Case of the Research Board for National Security, 1944–46". Technology and Culture. 16 (1): 20–47. doi:10.2307/3102364.
Kevles, Daniel J. (1995) [1977]. The Physicists: The History of a Scientific Community in Modern America. New York: Knopf. ISBN978-0674666566.
Leslie, Stuart W. (1993). The Cold War and American Science: The Military-Industrial-Academic Complex at MIT and Stanford. New York: Columbia University Press. ISBN978-0231079594.
Mowery, David C. (2010). "Military R&D and Innovation". In Hall, Bronwyn H.; Rosenberg, Nathan (eds.). Handbook of the Economics of Innovation. Vol.2. Elsevier. pp.1219–1256. doi:10.1016/S0169-7218(10)02013-7.
Office of Scientific Research and Development (OSRD) Reports at Library of Congress. A digital collection of declassified technical laboratory and field reports as well as other reference material from OSRD’s Division 12: Transportation and Division 16 Optics/ Camouflage. The material was digitized from the microfilm collection and represents the “most important” research reports found in the hardcopy collection.
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