Sethuraman Panchanathan, the director of the National Science Foundation, told me that Fuchs’s project is an “exemplar” of what he’s trying to achieve at the N.S.F. “We need to make sure we understand where we are. This project is perfectly aligned with what we had planned.” Fuchs is trying to keep politics out of the pilot project. She’s determined to avoid the fate of the congressional Office of Technology Assessment, which became a political lightning rod and was shut down in 1995 at the behest of House Speaker Newt Gingrich, Republican of Georgia. “One of the mistakes the O.T.A. made...