Tag Archive: Policy and Government Affairs
Articles relevant to Government Affairs.
The Task Force on American Innovation held a Capitol Hill reception titled “Deconstructing Precision Agriculture” on Wednesday, March 4. The Computing Research Association was a co-sponsor of the event. It showcased U.S. farmers, leading agriculture technology companies, and scientists including Computing Community Consortium (CCC) Council member and University of Minnesota distinguished university professor Shashi Shekhar.
The President’s FY 2016 Federal budget request, released in early February, would present a bit of a mixed bag for Federal science agencies.
Congress decided to be more Kris Kringle than Scrooge with science research budgets in its end-of-the-year budget wrap-up, delivering some surprising, but mostly small, increases to science agencies’ efforts. It was particularly good, relatively speaking, for the computing fields. While certainly not great, it was much better than simply flat funding or, worse, budget cuts like those endured by many other programs within the funding bills. And it certainly starts 2015 on a good note.
Despite hopes at the beginning of the year of Congress returning to regular order with regard to appropriation bills, the body has slide back into its old form of passing stopgap Continuing Resolutions (CR) to fund governmental operations. The good news is both chambers learned their lesson from last year and will not play chicken with a shutdown of the government — or at least, not before they stand before the voters in the November midterm elections.
On Wednesday, May 7, the Coalition for National Science Funding (or CNSF) held their yearly Exhibition on Capitol Hill. The exhibition, probably best described as a science fair with some really smart people, is a showcase of research and education projects supported by the National Science Foundation. It gives a great venue to show members of Congress and Congressional staff what the American people have funded.
On May 29, the U.S. House of Representatives was on the verge of approving new funding for the National Science Foundation (NSF) that would increase the agency’s budget more than 3 percent in FY 2015, while at the same time the House Science, Space and Technology Committee approved legislation the day before that would authorize smaller increases and place new restrictions and scrutiny on science funding at the same agency.
Before Congress wrapped up its work for 2013 and headed home for the December holidays, House and Senate lawmakers reached an agreement on FY 2014 and FY 2015 budget numbers that would avert sequester levels by providing about $63 billion of cap relief over both years. The agreement, brokered by House Budget Chair Paul Ryan (R-WI) and Senate Budget Chair Patty Murray (D-WA), provides sequester relief that includes an additional $22 billion for non-defense discretionary spending in FY 2014 and $19 billion in FY 2015, meaning that appropriators will have some added room to provide funding for federal science agencies like the National Science Foundation, National Institutes of Health, National Institute of Standards and Technology and Department of Energy, should they choose to.
On September 18, more than 30 researchers from across the country flew to Washington, DC to meet with members of their state’s congressional delegations, talk about work going on in their institutions, and help make the case for the federal investment in research.
As part of its mission to develop a next generation of leaders in the computing research community, the Computing Research Association’s Computing Community Consortium recently held its second Leadership in Science Policy Institute (LiSPI). This one and a half-day workshop was intended to educate a cadre of computing researchers on how science policy in the U.S. is formulated and how our government works. Participants heard candid and “off the record” views from people who do it or have done it. Fifty-three computer scientists and engineers from forty-eight different universities and research organizations attended the April 11-12th workshop.
On February 14, the House Science, Space, and Technology Committee’s Subcommittee on Research held a hearing on Applications for Information Technology Research and Development. CCC Chair and former CRA Board Chair Ed Lazowska, CRA-W Chair and current CRA Board Member Kathryn McKinley, representing Microsoft, and Kelly Gaither of the University of Texas at Austin testified on behalf of the computing community and articulated the importance of federal funding for computing research.
With the early morning January 1st deal to avert the “fiscal cliff” reached in the Senate — a deal that the House would ultimately approve — the 24-hour news networks turned off their fiscal cliff countdown clocks and turned instead to analyzing “what it all means.” Those discussions invariably focused on the tax implications of the deal — the extension of most of the Bush-era tax cuts. What was largely glossed over in the aftermath was the deal’s impact on federal spending and whether Congress had solved the problem of the looming sequester that threatened to cut up to 10 percent from nearly every discretionary spending account in the budget. The fact was, Congress had not solved the problem, it had merely elected to kick the problem down the road a bit farther out of sight.
