The House Appropriations Committee released their spending cuts version 2.0 — after having their previous attempt to cut $74 billion from the President’s request for non-defense discretionary spending savaged by conservative Republicans in the House — and NSF and DOE both face significant cuts. The appropriators went back and took another look at their first […]
Update: (Feb 11, 2011) – They’ve released version 2.0 of the proposal… Update: Um, nevermind. After conservative Republicans savaged the proposed $32 billion in cuts as inadequate, House Appropriations Chairman Hal Rogers pledged to come back with a proposal that would cut $100 billion, potentially putting NSF right back under the crosshairs. Here’s Roger’s statement: […]
The President delivered his annual State of the Union address this evening and made innovation – and the research and education investments that enable it – the central focus of nearly the first 25 minutes of it. It’s hard to quote just a part of it – I’d encourage you to read the whole thing, […]
Today the House voted to pass a revised version of the America COMPETES Act, a bill that would reauthorize several key science agencies and STEM Education programs, completing an unlikely resurrection of a bill most in the science advocacy community (including this correspondent) figured was dead in this session. COMPETES has been through quite a […]
President Obama yesterday invoked the specter of a “Sputnik moment” in competitiveness facing the country and re-emphasized his commitment to invest in innovation, infrastructure and education during a speech in North Carolina. Here’s the meat: You go to Shanghai, China, and they’ve built more high-speed rail in the last year than we’ve built in the […]
The two co-Chairs of the President’s “National Commission on Fiscal Responsibility and Reform” — a bi-partisan committee charged by the President with coming up with solutions to the “fiscal challenges” the nation faces over the medium and long term — set off quite a kerfuffle today by releasing a set of draft recommendations that call […]
The same committee that gathered five years ago to produce the highly-influential “Rising Above the Gathering Storm” National Academies study has reassembled to revisit the report and has come to even gloomier conclusions about the state of our innovation ecosystem. They’ve released a new version of the report at a congressional briefing today. This is […]
The House Commerce, Justice, Science Appropriations Subcommittee has marked up it’s FY11 appropriations bill and approved a healthy increase for the National Science Foundation. The committee approved essentially the President’s requested increase for NSF, about an 8 percent increase in FY11 vs. FY10. Here’s a breakdown. It appears that NSF’s Research and Related Activities account […]
FINAL UPDATE: (5/28/10 3:05 pm) COMPETES passes, sans troublesome MTR language: 262 – 150 with 17 Republicans in support. Now, on to the Senate! UPDATE: (5/28/10) – It looks like Rep. Gordon got creative with a solution to the COMPETES Act logjam. In a surprise move, he’s brought the original bill back to the floor […]
The COMPETES bill we discussed yesterday just got derailed – at the moment it’s just temporary, but it’s unclear how it goes forward from this point. Republican Ranking Member Ralph Hall (R-TX) introduced a “Motion to Recommit with Instructions” that, to just about everyone’s surprise, passed. The motion has had the effect of forcing the […]
