Backed by strong support from the White House, the President’s Council of Advisors on Science and Technology (PCAST) released a biennial report about the status and direction of the nation’s 14-agency, $4.3 billion Networking and Information Technology Research and Development (NITRD) program last month. The report emphasized the critical role of advances in networking and information technology (NIT) to U.S. economic competitiveness, and called on the nation to “continue to innovate more rapidly and creatively than other countries in important areas of NIT” in order to sustain and improve overall quality of life.

Congress appears favorably inclined to approve significant increases to some key science agencies next fiscal year, based on early action by both the House and Senate Appropriations Committees. Before the August recess both of the House and Senate Commerce, Justice, Science Appropriations subcommittees approved increases for the National Science Foundation and National Institute of Standards and Technology that were at or just below the significant increases requested by President Obama in his FY 2011 budget request in February.

Computing research programs at the National Science Foundation and the Department of Energy’s Office of Science are among those slated for increases in fiscal year 2010, thanks to appropriations legislation that would keep those agencies on a path to double their budgets over the next six years. Congress approved the last of twelve annual appropriations bills necessary to fund the operations of government on December 18, providing a healthy increase to the NSF budget, a more modest increase to DOE’s Office of Science, and a slight increase in real terms for the National Institute of Standards and Technology.

The first significant spending bill to cross newly elected President Barack Obama’s desk for approval in mid-February likely will be a mammoth $900 billion economic stimulus package that could include nearly $10 billion in federal research funds and research infrastructure support. That bill could be followed shortly by another big spending bill—an omnibus appropriations bill that includes funding for nearly every federal agency for FY2009, including hoped-for increases to the National Science Foundation, National Institute of Standards and Technology, and Department of Energy’s Office of Science.

After failing to meet the end-of-fiscal-year deadline on the annual appropriations bills necessary to keep the Federal government functioning, Congress and the Administration agreed on a stopgap funding measure in late September that will ensure that Federal science agencies in 2009 will face a fourth straight year of reduced budgets.