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.
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.
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!
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).
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!
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.
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.
With all the should-have-always-been-done-this-way good budget news coming out of Congress, we wanted to let our members know more details on what is likely to happen early in the 2014 calendar year.
As of publication, both the House and Senate have passed the budget agreement without major changes. This will allow the appropriations process to move forward. While the budget agreement isn’t great, it does give legislators a bit more breathing room to fund things they say are important (such as higher education and research), creating an opening for advocacy and having the community weigh in on these issues.
To that end, CRA has signed on to a number of letters in support of key research agencies in the Fiscal Year 2014 (FY14) budgets. The Coalition for National Security Research (CNSR) recently put out a statement in support of Defense Science and Technology (S&T) programs. The statement calls for funding the S&T programs at the FY14 National Defense Authorization Act (H.Res. 1960) levels, “which passed Congress with overwhelming bipartisan support.”
In addition, the Energy Sciences Coalition (ESC), which supports science research at the Department of Energy, specifically in the DOE Office of Science, sent a letter to the House and Senate appropriators urging them to, “assign a high priority to funding for the Department of Energy’s Office of Science and the Advanced Research Projects Agency for Energy (ARPA-E).”
On the NSF front, with a budget framework in place, the House Science, Space, & Technology Committee can move forward with the Frontiers in Innovation, Research, Science, and Technology Act of 2013 (FIRST Act). This is the reauthorization of the America COMPETES Acts of 2007 and 2010. The Coalition for the National Science Foundation (CNSF) has sent a statement to the Science Committee advocating for a reauthorization bill that will, “set forth a robust vision to maintain our Nation’s leadership in science and technology.”
In short: things are moving again on Capitol Hill. Hopefully, 2014 and the Fiscal Year 2015 budget will be more normal and less brinkmanship. We have our hopes and our doubts on what might happen. The President and Congressional leaders are saying we’ve turned a corner; however, we’re reminded of a basic law of the universe: objections in motion stay in motion and objects at rest stay at rest. Congress hasn’t been operating normally for some time and it will take quite a lot of effort for it to get back to a regular budget procedure. Only time will tell if this is a change from the past or just a pause.
House Budget Chair Paul Ryan (R-WI) and Senate Budget Chair Patty Murray (D-WA) announced Tuesday afternoon that they’d 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. That sequester relief includes $22 billion for non-defense discretionary spending in FY 2014 and $19 billion in FY 2015, meaning that appropriators will have some additional room to provide funding for federal science agencies like NSF, NIH, NIST and DOE, should they choose to.
The agreement, assuming it’s adopted by both chambers (not a slam dunk, but a decent bet), would avert a shutdown in January and allow appropriators to move forward with an omnibus appropriations bill for most of the outstanding FY14 appropriations, something they have indicated they’ll do with 12 of the 14 bills in the second week of January. Maybe more importantly, the agreement sets the caps for FY15 as well, allowing appropriators to begin work on FY15 bills on schedule, knowing the House and Senate are working from the same set of numbers for the first time in many years, and with a reasonable expectation that they might actually get some of the bills done in regular order — something they haven’t done in, well, probably a decade or more.
There’s enough to hate in the agreement for both parties, which is a pretty good indication that it’s a decent compromise, and leadership on both sides believes they have the votes to pass it. Both Ryan and Murray spoke about the agreement as being an essential piece of Congress reasserting its power of the purse, something it had abdicated to the Administration with the sequester deal (where the Administration got to make the decisions about how the cuts fell on programs at agencies), and both emphasized that it was an important step in changing the crisis-to-crisis mode of legislating that Congress has adopted of late. Let’s hope that’s true on both counts.
Anyway, some good news about budget after many, many months/years of frustrating developments. We’re nowhere near out of the brutal budget climate that has pervaded for the last few years, but perhaps there’s a small bit of sanity that’s beginning to emerge. If so, we’ll have all the details!
The committee has released the text of the agreement, a section by section summary, and an overall summary. The House could vote by the end of the week, with Senate action shortly thereafter.
CRA is pleased to announce that Brian Mosley has joined its staff starting today as Policy Analyst. In this position, Brian will track a number of issues of importance to the computing community, including Robotics R&D, STEM Education issues, and policies surrounding Open Access and Open Data efforts at the Federal level. He’ll also be a part of CRA’s efforts to engage more computing researchers in the policy process like CRA’s Fall Congressional Fly-in and the CRA/CCC Leadership in Science Policy Institute, and work closely with CRA’s Director of Government Affairs, Peter Harsha, on the rest of the CRA issues portfolio.
Brian comes to CRA with over seven years experience in government affairs in technology & innovation policy, science and energy research, and STEM education with the Washington Office of the American Physical Society and in Congress. In his spare time, he’s an accomplished amateur photographer with multiple photographs having been displayed in juried art shows. He’s a graduate of St. Mary’s College of Maryland with a B.A. in History and Political Science.
We also expect Brian to be a frequent contributor to the blog!
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NIST FY15 Request
/In: FY15 Appropriations /by Brian MosleyIn 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
/In: Funding, FY15 Appropriations /by Brian MosleyAs 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
/In: Funding, FY15 Appropriations /by Peter HarshaSo, 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:
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!
/In: Computing Education /by Brian MosleyGood 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
/In: FY14 Appropriations /by Peter HarshaHouse 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
/In: Computing Education /by Brian MosleyDespite 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
/In: Computing Education /by Brian MosleyCode.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.
CRA & Science Community Advocacy Starting Out the New Year
/In: FY14 Appropriations, FY15 Appropriations /by Brian MosleyWith all the should-have-always-been-done-this-way good budget news coming out of Congress, we wanted to let our members know more details on what is likely to happen early in the 2014 calendar year.
As of publication, both the House and Senate have passed the budget agreement without major changes. This will allow the appropriations process to move forward. While the budget agreement isn’t great, it does give legislators a bit more breathing room to fund things they say are important (such as higher education and research), creating an opening for advocacy and having the community weigh in on these issues.
To that end, CRA has signed on to a number of letters in support of key research agencies in the Fiscal Year 2014 (FY14) budgets. The Coalition for National Security Research (CNSR) recently put out a statement in support of Defense Science and Technology (S&T) programs. The statement calls for funding the S&T programs at the FY14 National Defense Authorization Act (H.Res. 1960) levels, “which passed Congress with overwhelming bipartisan support.”
In addition, the Energy Sciences Coalition (ESC), which supports science research at the Department of Energy, specifically in the DOE Office of Science, sent a letter to the House and Senate appropriators urging them to, “assign a high priority to funding for the Department of Energy’s Office of Science and the Advanced Research Projects Agency for Energy (ARPA-E).”
On the NSF front, with a budget framework in place, the House Science, Space, & Technology Committee can move forward with the Frontiers in Innovation, Research, Science, and Technology Act of 2013 (FIRST Act). This is the reauthorization of the America COMPETES Acts of 2007 and 2010. The Coalition for the National Science Foundation (CNSF) has sent a statement to the Science Committee advocating for a reauthorization bill that will, “set forth a robust vision to maintain our Nation’s leadership in science and technology.”
In short: things are moving again on Capitol Hill. Hopefully, 2014 and the Fiscal Year 2015 budget will be more normal and less brinkmanship. We have our hopes and our doubts on what might happen. The President and Congressional leaders are saying we’ve turned a corner; however, we’re reminded of a basic law of the universe: objections in motion stay in motion and objects at rest stay at rest. Congress hasn’t been operating normally for some time and it will take quite a lot of effort for it to get back to a regular budget procedure. Only time will tell if this is a change from the past or just a pause.
Happy Holidays — We Might Have a Budget Deal!
/In: Funding, FY14 Appropriations, FY15 Appropriations, Policy /by Peter HarshaHouse Budget Chair Paul Ryan (R-WI) and Senate Budget Chair Patty Murray (D-WA) announced Tuesday afternoon that they’d 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. That sequester relief includes $22 billion for non-defense discretionary spending in FY 2014 and $19 billion in FY 2015, meaning that appropriators will have some additional room to provide funding for federal science agencies like NSF, NIH, NIST and DOE, should they choose to.
The agreement, assuming it’s adopted by both chambers (not a slam dunk, but a decent bet), would avert a shutdown in January and allow appropriators to move forward with an omnibus appropriations bill for most of the outstanding FY14 appropriations, something they have indicated they’ll do with 12 of the 14 bills in the second week of January. Maybe more importantly, the agreement sets the caps for FY15 as well, allowing appropriators to begin work on FY15 bills on schedule, knowing the House and Senate are working from the same set of numbers for the first time in many years, and with a reasonable expectation that they might actually get some of the bills done in regular order — something they haven’t done in, well, probably a decade or more.
There’s enough to hate in the agreement for both parties, which is a pretty good indication that it’s a decent compromise, and leadership on both sides believes they have the votes to pass it. Both Ryan and Murray spoke about the agreement as being an essential piece of Congress reasserting its power of the purse, something it had abdicated to the Administration with the sequester deal (where the Administration got to make the decisions about how the cuts fell on programs at agencies), and both emphasized that it was an important step in changing the crisis-to-crisis mode of legislating that Congress has adopted of late. Let’s hope that’s true on both counts.
Anyway, some good news about budget after many, many months/years of frustrating developments. We’re nowhere near out of the brutal budget climate that has pervaded for the last few years, but perhaps there’s a small bit of sanity that’s beginning to emerge. If so, we’ll have all the details!
The committee has released the text of the agreement, a section by section summary, and an overall summary. The House could vote by the end of the week, with Senate action shortly thereafter.
Mosley Joins CRA Policy Staff!
/In: CRA, People, Policy /by Peter HarshaBrian comes to CRA with over seven years experience in government affairs in technology & innovation policy, science and energy research, and STEM education with the Washington Office of the American Physical Society and in Congress. In his spare time, he’s an accomplished amateur photographer with multiple photographs having been displayed in juried art shows. He’s a graduate of St. Mary’s College of Maryland with a B.A. in History and Political Science.
We also expect Brian to be a frequent contributor to the blog!