The Computing Research Association (or CRA) has been involved in shaping public policy of relevance to computing research for more than two decades. More recently the CRA Government Affairs program has enhanced its efforts to help the members of the computing research community contribute to the public debate knowledgeably and effectively.
When we last provided an update on the Fiscal Year 2019 Federal Budget, some sections had been passed into law, a large chunk of it was expected to move in a few days, and some key bills were anticipated to be left for after the mid-term elections. As it turns out, not all of that happened as expected.
It’s been a busy September from a Congressional appropriations perspective. As of this writing, nine of the twelve appropriations bills have passed, including the Defense, Energy and Water, and Labor-Health and Human Services (HHS) bills – a productive pace not seen from Congress in many years. While it’s good these were passed into law, and they do cover some important research agencies, left unfinished is one key bill of concern to the computing research community — the Commerce, Justice, Science (CJS) appropriations bill, which includes funding for NSF, NIST, NOAA and NASA; more on that in a moment. Until then, here are the details of the pieces of legislative that have passed.
Our regular readers will have noticed that Congress was busy over the summer with the Fiscal Year 2019 (FY19) Appropriations. With funding levels agreed to last year, both the House and Senate were able to plow ahead and get much of their work done for the next fiscal year (which is set to start on October 1st). However, our regular readers will also recognize that that’s when Congress tends to hit a roadblock; this year is no different. The twist for this year is that a good amount of research funding is being held up in the process.
Continuing CRA’s tracking of the Fiscal Year 2019 (FY19) appropriations process, we turn to the Senate’s Commerce, Justice and Science appropriations bill. The Senate Appropriations Committee marked up their version of the CJS bill on June 14th (by June 28th, the Committee finished marking up all 12 subcommittees’ bills, a 30-year record for timeliness). The CJS bill includes funding for NSF, NIST, and NASA, which are of the most concern to the computing community, along with funding for the Department of Justice. While the attention surrounding this bill has been dominated by immigration issues concerning the Department of Justice, science and computing research have fared relatively well.
[Editor’s Note: This post was written by CRA’s new Tisdale Policy Fellow for Summer 2018, Amita Shukla.] Continuing CRA’s tracking of the Fiscal Year 2019 (FY19) appropriations process, we pick up with coverage of the Energy and Water Appropriations bills. This is the annual appropriations bill that funds the Department of Energy (DOE) and all […]
Congress has taken its first steps at setting funding levels for FY19 and at first glance, it looks positive for some key science agencies. The House Appropriations committee last week passed it’s version of the FY19 Commerce, Justice, Science appropriations and included a 5.2 percent overall increase for NSF, including a 5.0 percent increase to […]
Last month, President Trump released his budget request for Fiscal Year 2019. As we have done in years past, the CRA Policy Blog will be doing a series of posts on the assorted agency budgets that are important to the computing research community. In this post we highlight the Department of Energy (DOE).
Big news out of Washington today is that there is a new budget deal that could provide much needed relief to Federal science research agencies. Similar to the deals from 2013 and 2015, this agreement would suspend the budgetary caps imposed in the 2011 Budget Control Act for two years.
The White House yesterday released its annual guidance to agencies on priorities for R&D budgets. The memo, signed by Office of Management and Budget Director Mick Mulvaney and Deputy U.S. CTO Michael Kratsios for the Office of Science and Technology Policy, outlines a set of priorities for Federal science agencies to consider as they put […]
To continue our breakdown of the House and Senate appropriations moves, we turn to the Energy and Water Appropriations bills, which fund the Department of Energy (DOE). The parts of the department of most concern to the computing community are the Office of Science (SC), home of most of the agency’s basic research support, and ARPA-E, or the Advanced Research Projects Agency-Energy.
