Four years ago, federal officials launched an initiative to study mathematics and science cognition. Since then, that program has begun to exert its influence through the relatively modest but steady flow of public funding it provides for scholarly research. In this article, the author features the federal center entitled, Program on Mathematics and Science Cognition and Learning, Development and Disorders that operates within the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development, the same federal entity that has generated much of the research that strongly influences federal reading policy. The central role of the NICHD program is to finance that research with public money--rather than generate it independently. Those studies, in turn, often end up in articles published in scholarly journals, which can shape the collective thinking of the education community.