Computing Research Policy Blog

“Which would you rather have: more money or end of Sequestration?”


The title of this post was the last question, asked by Chairwoman Barbara Mikulski (D-MD), at the Senate Appropriations hearing Tuesday afternoon. It was a telling question and got to the root of the budgetary problems facing the Federal science agencies at this point in time: would it be better to have more (modest) funding right now, which will only be cut back when the paused Sequestration starts back up in two years; or would it be best to have lower numbers now but an end to Sequestration (meaning more certainty) to allow the agencies to plan? Mikulski was clear that they couldn’t have both, as she explicitly said that the committee would be following the Murray/Ryan Budget Agreement . After she made her question, the Senator did give the witnesses an out, saying “you may not want to answer that.”

For the most part, the witnesses answered that question by saying: more certainty. Director Collins pointed out that because of the Sequester NIH lost, taking into account inflation, about 10% of its budget. He said, “a stable predictable trajectory,” for the agency’s budget was a necessity. Director Prabhakar, in saying that she needed more certainty, pointed out that DARPA is not trying to grow significantly. That combined with an 8% Sequester cut and a 12% decline in recent years means that DARPA has been hit very hard. Secretary Moniz echoed both of those positions and said DOE needs certainty. The only person who said more funding would be best was Director Cordova; she made the point that we should, “do now what we can do now.” She illustrated that by pointing out the Foundation was not able to fund about 700 proposals and that impacted around 800 scientists. That answer also made the point that there is no good/right answer here.

As for the rest of the hearing, there was very little political posturing and ideologically based questions, and both sides of the aisle felt more had to be done to get money to scientists. In fact, the next day Director Holdren was quoted as calling the hearing, “nearly a love fest.” The only instances of anything that could be called an ideological statement was when Senator Shelby (R-AL), the highest ranked Republican on the committee, said in his opening statement, “if we cannot practice fiscal discipline today, we will pay a much higher price in the future,”? while pointing out that the committee can’t simply increase funding for these agencies (in his closing statement, Senator Shelby did say he was open to giving the science agencies “leeway” with their budgets). However, Senator Blunt (R-MO), a long time supporter of research at NIH, made the counterpoint, “is the health of our country discretionary?” Neither of these statements is a surprise, given the budgetary environment of Congress; but they do demonstrate the constraints that the committee is working with and what the science agencies have to work under.

The Democratic side mainly focused on specific areas that concerned them and their state specific constituents. However, one of the more interesting exchanges was between Senator Harkin (D-IA) and Director Collins of NIH, where the Senator pointed out that it was almost impossible to get private sector funding for the Genome Initiative until the early successes of the Federally backed science showed promise. Senator Harkin, speaking off the cuff, said that an “initial Federal investment of around $3.5B produced an estimated $900B market in return.” The implication was that this is an example that shows private money will follow only when the Federally backed basic research shows promise. Beyond that, Chairwoman Mikulski had many of the best points, such as when she said she “wanted to make sure they (American scientists) can do what they’re educated to do;” which is research.

On the whole, the hearing was positive. It showed that the Federal science agencies have a good reputation with Senate Appropriators (also demonstrated with the House Appropriations Commerce, Justice, Science subcommittee passing a bill favorable to NSF and NIST). Also, there are leaders in Congress, on both sides of the aisle, who want to protect science in the budget process. This is an on-going process; the specter of Sequestration starting up again in two years is hanging over everyone. And Chairwoman Mikulski’s question is still sitting there: which would be more helpful, more money or an end to Sequestration?

Major Senate Hearing on Federal Science Investments


Tomorrow the full Senate Appropriations Committee will be holding an major hearing on “Driving Innovation through Federal Investments.” This is important news as the list of witnesses being called is a who’s-who of Federal science agencies: the Secretary of Energy, the President’s science advisor, and the Directors of NSF, DARPA, and NIH. Of course, you might remember the Senate Appropriations Committee from being one half of being in charge of funding the Federal Government. As I said, MAJOR hearing next week.

The Appropriations Committee chairwoman, Senator Barbara Mikulski (D-MD), is a huge champion for science, and it’s clear that she feels the Federal Government can be doing more to spur innovation through investing in the science agencies. The science advocacy community in Washington is very excited, because our issues haven’t had such a high profile venue like this for some time.

To take advantage of that venue, CRA is joining with fifty other organizations in submitting testimony for the hearing. These organizations are organizing around the message “Close the Innovation Deficit,” which the Senate Appropriations Committee has picked up on. The term “Innovation Deficit” means the, “the widening gap between the actual level of federal government funding for research and higher education and what the investment needs to be if the United States is to remain the world’s innovation leader.” We’d highly recommend going to their website, checking out the video, and reading the testimony (it includes the other organizations which have signed on). We’ll have a recap of the hearing later in the week as well.

NSF’s Budget Request Flat for FY15


Given the relatively austere budget caps for FY2015 the President and Congress agreed to as part of last December’s budget agreement, the President’s relatively flat budget request for the National Science Foundation in FY2015 isn’t unexpected. In fact, the President’s request for NSF would have the agency grow just 1 percent over FY14 (to $7.3 billion), while research at the agency would actually decrease by $3 million under the President’s plan ($5.191 billion in FY14 vs. $5.188 billion in FY15).CISEBudgetFY15

Funding for NSF’s Computer and Information Science and Engineering (CISE) directorate, the home of the great bulk of NSF’s computing research and infrastructure investments, follows a similar trajectory in the President’s budget. Under the President’s plan, the CISE budget would remain at essentially the same level ($893 million) as in FY14 ($894 million). Coming after two years in which CISE did disproportionately “well” in the budget calculus, this flat budget is a little easier to bear. But it does mean that CISE AD Farnam Jahanian had to do a little reshuffling to protect priorities within the CISE budget. In particular, the directorate’s contributions to a number of cross-agency initiatives would be scaled back somewhat in order to take care of “core” research funding within the directorate.

In his letter to the computing research community, Jahanian noted four areas of priority within the directorate request: expansions of CISE foundational research; investments in crosscutting programs led by CISE; investments in advanced cyberinfrastructure, and education and workforce development.

In addition to CISE’s investments in its core foundational research, the directorate will remain a player in a number of key cross-agency programs, albeit in a slightly reduced role in some cases. Here are some details:

Cyber Enabled Materials, Manufacturing, and Smart Systems (CEMMSS): This is a $213 million program across the Foundation geared towards accelerating advances in “21st century smart engineered systems.” CISE’s investment of $81.5 million in FY15 (down from $85 million in FY14) would focus on advanced manufacturing, cyber physical systems, the National Robotics Initiative, Critical Resilient Interdependent Infrastructure Systems and Processes (CRISP) and their interaction and synthesis.

Cyberinfrastructure Framework for 21st Century Science and Engineering (CIF21): The Foundation would spend $125 million across all the major research directorates in FY15, with CISE contributing $80 million (down from $85 million in FY14). CISE’s focus includes work on Big Data, data infrastructure building blocks, building new computational and data-enabled science and engineering research communities, advancing new computational infrastructure and building partnerships.

Cognitive Science and Neuroscience: NSF’s contribution to the White House’s BRAIN initiative (with NSF, NIH and DARPA), would be $29 million foundation-wide in FY15. CISE would contribute $5.65 million vs. $3.5 million in FY14. CISE’s focus is on addressing the challenges of research integration across multiple scales and builds on ongoing NSF investments like the Collaborative Research in Computational Neuroscience collaboration with NIH, Germany and France.

Innovation Corps (I-Corps): The Foundation would invest $25 million in this program designed to accelerate innovations from the lab to the market. CISE’s contribution would grow to $10 million (up from $8 million in FY14), and Jahanian noted that given the level of interest in the program from the community, the directorate could easily invest twice as much.

Secure and Trustworthy Cyberspace (SaTC): The Foundation would spend $100 million on SaTC in FY15 under the President’s plan, and $67 million of that investment would be in the CISE directorate. The focus of CISE’s effort in this space is to support fundamental scientific advances and technologies to protect cyber-systems from malicious behavior, while preserving privacy and promoting usability.

Jahanian’s presentation from the NSF budget roll-out goes into additional detail about these programs and the other efforts the directorate plans for FY15, and the official justification to Congress contains even more detail. The President’s “Opportunity, Growth, and Security Initiative” — his supplemental budget request, should Congress feel the need to spend more than the caps they agreed to — includes $552 million in new spending for NSF, some of which would find its way into CISE for investments in cybersecurity, clean energy/sustainable computing, and core research activities. However, this is essentially dead on arrival in Congress. Sorry.

NIST FY15 Request


In our continuing series on the Fiscal Year 2015 (FY15) Presidential Budget request, we next come to NIST, or the National Institute of Standards and Technology. NIST is on the smaller size of the science agencies, budget-authority-speaking, but it is still a significant contributor for IT research.

The main part of the agency that CRA is concerned about is the Scientific and Technical Research and Services account, or STRS. This part of the agency’s budget handles the research grants, special programs, and laboratory operations of NIST. STRS is slated to receive $680 million in the president’s budget, which represents a 4.5 percent increase over the FY14 enacted levels.

The increases will go to a number of special programs that the Administration has marked as vital to the national interest. Three of these increases are in areas that are of particular concern to members of CRA. For example, the Administration is interested in increasing its investment in the “Advanced Cyber-Physical Systems for National Priorities” program. This program focuses on Cyber-physical systems, or CPSs, which, “combine the cyber and physical worlds with technologies that can respond in real time to their environments and incoming data.” CPSs were identified as a national priority for Federal R&D by PCAST. The increase in funding would be $7.5 million, bringing the total amount for the program to $11.7 million.

As well, there is a suggested increase of $5 million, for a total of $18.8 million, for the Materials Genome Initiative, “an interagency effort to dramatically influence the pace for bringing new materials to market (Found here in the Executive Summary). Through this program, “NIST is developing infrastructure to support innovation in advanced materials, including data assessment and validation, data standards and modeling and simulation tools.”

The last program of note to our readers would be the NIST’s request for $6 million to develop laboratory-to-market strategies that accelerate commercialization of federal technologies. NIST has government-wide responsibilities for ensuring that taxpayer-funded technologies are transitioned to the marketplace. Congress and the Administration have taken a particular interest in technology transfer in recent years, hoping that it will translate into jobs and economic growth.

So, on the whole, NIST is doing relatively well in the President’s Request; no serious cuts and healthy increases, for the current budget environment. We’ll have to keep a close eye on the agency as the budget process moves forward, but things are looking ok so far.

Dept of Energy FY15 Request: Good for IT Research, but with Qualifiers


As we mentioned, President Obama released his budget request for the Fiscal Year 2015 (FY15) on Tuesday. We’ll be doing a series of posts on the assorted agencies’ budgets that are important to the computing research community. The first agency that we want to highlight is the Department of Energy (DOE), as they released their top line numbers on March 4th (most of the other science agencies are releasing their numbers next week).

Two key parts of the agency for the computing community are the Office of Science (SC), home of most of the agency’s basic research support, and ARPA-E. For SC, the office would only see a 0.9 percent increase from FY14 to FY15 (going from $5.07B to $5.11B). However, that small overall increase masks significant gains for the subaccount that matters most to computing researchers: ASCR or Advanced Scientific Computing Research. ASCR would see a significant increase in funding, going up by 13.2 percent (or $478M in FY14 to $571M in FY15). Much of the justification for this increase is tagged to work on achieving exascale computing, application of high performance computer simulation and modeling, and operations & upgrades to ASCR facilities. ASCR would receive the largest increase within DOE SC’s request. This is obviously good, but the details are important, and we should get those soon.

As for ARPA-E (or Advanced Research Projects Agency-Energy), it would see a large increase of 16.1 percent (or $280M in FY14 to $325M in FY15). This increase is to support, “transformational energy R&D…as part of a $5.2 billion DOE investment in clean energy technology programs.” While this number is encouraging, it is important to note that a large increase in ARPA-E’s budget has been a regular occurrence with Obama Administration budget requests over the years. And Congress doesn’t have a good record of passing those suggested increases. In the FY14 Omnibus, for example, the agency received just enough funding to roll back much of what it had lost to the sequester in FY13 ($275M in FY12; $252M in FY13; and $280M in FY14) but still fell well short of the President’s request for FY14 ($379M).

It is both important, and not important, to note that the President has signaled DOE as a major agency in his “Opportunity, Growth, and Security Initiative,” or his wish list of programs that ought to receive extra funding beyond the FY15 budget caps. It is important because it demonstrates that the Administration is still concerned about scientific research. However, it is not important because the Initiative is dead on arrival with Congress. Whether this is good or bad, to paraphrase Obi-Wan Kenobi, “depends greatly on a certain point of view.”

To sum up, the President’s DOE request is good news for the computing research community, at least at the top line level. Remember, detailed budget info has not been released yet and, as the saying goes, the devil is in the details. As more information is released, we’ll be posting it here, so stay tuned.

President’s Budget Request Underwhelming for Science – First Look


So, the good news this year was that the President and Congress were working from the same set of numbers for the first time in a long time. The bad news is that those numbers are pretty underwhelming. The President introduced his FY15 budget request today, a budget that would remain largely flat — increasing discretionary spending just $2 billion over FY14 ($1.014 trillion in FY15 vs. $1.012 trillion in FY14). NSF would grow just 1 percent (to $7.3 billion) under the “base budget” in the President’s plan. Research at NSF would actually decrease $3 million under the President’s plan ($5.191 billion in FY14 vs. $5.188 billion in FY15). (We’ll have lots more information about NSF’s budget request next Monday when the agency rolls out its detailed budget justification.)

Recognizing that the agreed-to budget caps were overly constraining for all the Administration’s priorities, the President included a $52 billion “wish list” of additional funding proposals — called the “Opportunity, Growth, and Security Initiative” — that includes increased funding for key science agencies that could be offset by cuts to farm subsidy programs, tax increases on “multi-million dollar retirement accounts,” and other spending cuts and tax increases identified by the Administration. Were that wish list to be approved by Congress, NSF could see an additional $552 million in funding (and R&D agencies overall would see an increase of $5.3 billion) However, congressional Republicans have already declared the wish list DOA.

Funding for other agencies in the President’s base budget is a bit of a mixed bag:

  • DOE basic and applied research would be up 6.1 percent in the President’s plan ($8.412 billion in FY 15 vs. $7.932 billion in FY14)
  • DOD basic and applied research would see an increase of 4.4 percent ($6.582 billion vs. $6.307 billion
  • NIST basic and applied research would increase 3.3 percent ($598 million vs $579 million)
  • NIH basic and applied research would increase 0.7 percent ($29.403 billion vs. $29.205 billion)
  • Homeland Security basic and applied research would decrease 1 percent ($250 million vs. $251 million).

Keep in mind that the expected inflation rate between FY 2014 and FY 2015 is about 2 percent.

The White House has released an R&D Budget Fact sheet that goes into some of the details.

But we’ll learn more about the agency priorities as the agencies roll out their own budget request over the next week or so.

As always, we’ll have the details as we learn them!

Good job news for CS majors!


Good news, computer science majors: you’ll make more money, on average, in your first job after college!

According to a recent report by the National Association of Colleges and Employers (NACE), engineering and computer science majors, on average, make twice as much as their humanities and social science peers in their starting jobs; they even beat out the business majors. Salaries did slip a little from last year (the avg salary was about $100 lower in 2013; see chart below), but CS majors also received the highest number of job offers before graduation of the disciplines surveyed (69 percent had received at least one job offer).

Graph source from Forbes.

Congress Rolls Back the Sequester on Science, at Least for Now


House and Senate negotiators have actually succeeded in reaching agreement on final numbers for all 12 outstanding FY 14 appropriations bills packaged into one omnibus bill (HR 3547) and, at first glance — considering the current budget environment and how bad things could have been — it’s not awful.

Here’s a quick summary:

NSF — The omnibus would fund NSF overall at $7.17 billion in FY 14. That’s well below the $7.6 billion requested by the President (and $82 million below the FY13 pre-sequester “enacted” number), but $290 million more than the FY13 post-sequester level, or an increase in real dollars for the agency of about 4.2 percent. Research and Related Activities would receive a similar increase – 4.1 percent to $5.8 billion. In both cases, appropriators appear to have split the difference in recommended funding levels between the more frugal House-approved plan and the more generous Senate Appropriations Committee approved plan.

DOD — Defense basic research (6.1) would see a 10 percent increase versus FY13 post-sequester; applied research (6.2) would increase 6.7 percent; and advanced technology development (6.3) would increase 3.7 percent — which suggests that the appropriators are heeding the message that basic and applied research should see some priority in the budget after short-term thinking cost them in previous budgets. I haven’t parsed all the line-by-line numbers in the bill yet to see how specific computing accounts fared, however.

DOE — DOE’s Office of Science would see an increase of about 9.7 percent to $5.07 billion in the bill. ARPA-E would remain unchanged at $280 million. The Advanced Scientific Computing Research program would see an increase to $478.6 million from $419 million in FY13 post-sequester (an increase of 14.2 percent).

NIST — NIST’s “core research” would see an increase of $41 million vs. FY13.

NIH — NIH’s budget would increase to $29.9 billion, from $28.4 billion in FY13 post-sequester.

So, in most cases, the omnibus would roll back the impacts of last year’s sequester, and in many cases provide increases beyond the roll back. Maybe just as importantly, this omnibus signals that FY14 appropriations are actually completed — there will be no continuing resolution for agencies for which there was too much controversy to reach a deal. House and Senate negotiators actually agreed to drop provisions the other side found contentious in the spirit of getting these bills done.

The House passed the bill today (359-67). Passage should also be swift in the Senate. Congress yesterday passed a short continuing resolution through Saturday to give themselves enough time to get this done.

Next up is the President’s budget for FY15 released in early Feb, then another shot at the debt limit (though the expectation is it will pass without as much of a fight this time around), and then appropriators will set to work on FY 15 appropriations, which they hope to finish in regular order — something that hasn’t happened in nearly two decades. We’ll keep you updated!

“Make Computer Science Count,” Code.org Founder Hadi Partovi Says to Congress


Despite strong current and projected future demand for computer science skills in nearly every field, most K-12 schools don’t offer computer science and most students don’t get exposure to it on any level, Code.org founder Hadi Partovi told a congressional panel last Thursday. Testifying before the House Science Subcommittee on Research and Technology hearing on “Private Sector Programs that Engage Students in STEM,” Partovi told the Members that the STEM crisis groups like Code.org are seeking to address is really a computing crisis, with “demand for computing professionals…about four times higher than all other occupations” and student participation rates in computer science lagging well behind.

“Half of all jobs in STEM fields will be in computing,” Partovi, said, “almost every job — medicine, law, business, and banking — increasingly requires foundational familiarity with computer science.” Code.org’s advocacy goals is to, “make computer science count,” to satisfy existing math or science graduation requirements; he pointed out that this goal runs into opposition because of legal and regulator requirements at the federal, state, and local levels. Adding computer science as a “core academic subject” in the Elementary and Secondary Education Act is one step Congress could take, Partovi noted – a recommendation that seemed to find bipartisan support from the Members of the committee. There are other federal, state and local efforts to ensure that computer science is “at the table,” Mr. Partovi said, but more could be done.

He then explained Code.org’s Hour of Code campaign and its success: in December 2013, 20 million students participated in the program, which is 1 in 4 students in kindergarten through 12th grade, and half of those students were girls. In summing up the participation numbers, “more students participated in computer science during Computer Science Education Week 2013 than had ever taken computer science in the history of our K-12 system.” And there is already a clear response, where, “in the past month, 10,000 teachers have signed up 500,000 students for the follow-on 20-hour, online Introduction to Computer Science course.” As he said later, this participation blows away many excuses for not teaching computer science in schools, such as that students couldn’t learn it, or that girls would not want to take part.

Partovi was joined on the panel by FIRST Robotics founder Dean Kamen, who echoed many of the points made by Partovi and other witnesses and emphasized that neither his organization or code.org were there looking for any Federal funding for their programs. “We aren’t asking for anything except to give kids access to these programs,” Kamen said. The resources and mentors are there, Kamen said, we just need to find a way to encourage schools to allow their students access to them.

The hearing was well attended by members of the committee, a good indication of interest in the subject matter (though the C-SPAN cameras may also have been a factor), and the questions posed were all generally supportive of the points raised by Partovi and the other witnesses at the hearing. Rep. Derek Kilmer (D-WA) asked a question the echoed a theme heard throughout the hearing: “What can Congress do to improve the STEM workforce?” Partovi’s answer was simple: “the $3 billion STEM education investment by the Federal government needs to include computer science.” As he put it later, in response to a similar question from Representative Randy Hultgren (R-IL), “we need to put the T back into STEM.” Questions by other members focused on how the Federal government could help with broadening engagement and retaining student interest in computer science. Partovi said that there are multiple problems with engagement; the most significant are that for women it is a cultural problem of seeing computer science as not being for girls, while for minorities it is mainly an availability problem. And then finished saying that making it fun will help with retaining students.

In addition to Partovi and Kamen, the panel included Kemi Jona, Director of the Office of STEM Education Partnerships at Northwestern University, and Phillip Cornwell, Vice President for Academic Affairs and Professor of Mechanical Engineering at Rose-Hulman Institute of Technology. You can read their testimony in full at the subcommittee’s website. There also was a second panel of secondary school students (our original post about the hearing mistakenly identified them as educators) who were participants in the FIRST program. The students spoke on the experiences they gained from the program and how it has impacted their student careers.

While the Science Committee doesn’t have jurisdictional access to all the relevant levers that need to be pulled to make serious change to computer science’s stature in Federal STEM policies, the attention paid to the subject – and the number of Members at the hearing who indicated they would sign on to the Computer Science Education Act – should help advance these issues even further.

Code.org goes before Congress


Code.org’s amazingly successful Hour of Code campaign will get some further congressional attention on Thursday as the House Science Subcommittee on Research and Technology will hear from Code.org founder Hadi Partovi as part of a hearing on “Private Sector Programs that Engage Students in STEM”. It starts at 10am and will be webcast live (check back at that previous link for the webcast).

Partovi will be presenting the results of the Hour of Code campaign (20 million students participated; the goal was 10 million) to Congressional leaders. As well, the committee will be hearing from STEM education researchers, such as Dr. Kemi Jona, Director of the Office of STEM Education Partnerships at Northwestern University and a federally funded researcher, and Washington DC area secondary school educators. It should be an interesting and informative hearing and we’ll be sure to report back with a recap.

Please use the Category and Archive Filters below, to find older posts. Or you may also use the search bar.

Categories

Archives