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!
CRA is hiring! We’re looking for a new Policy Analyst on our Government Affairs staff. If you’re interested in helping the computing research community make its case in Washington, or know someone who is, please see the ad below!
POLICY ANALYST
The Computing Research Association, the national voice of the computing research community, seeks a Policy Analyst for its Government Affairs staff. This person will work closely with the Director of Government Affairs tracking and managing their own portfolio of policy issues, providing research support, planning events, handling some administrative duties, and helping communicate with CRA’s membership.
The ideal candidate will have a Bachelors degree in information technology, public policy or a related field; some experience in a policy-oriented environment; some experience planning workshops or briefings; excellent verbal and written skills; web-skills; and a demonstrated interest in federal research policy and computing. Interested candidates should submit a resume with cover letter describing their qualifications and salary requirements via email to analyst@cra.org
About CRA –
The Computing Research Association (CRA) is an association of more than 200 North American academic departments of computer science, computer engineering, and related fields; laboratories and centers in industry, government, and academia engaging in basic computing research; and affiliated professional societies.
CRA’s mission is to enhance innovation by joining with industry, government and academia to strengthen research and advanced education in computing. CRA executes this mission by leading the computing research community, informing policymakers and the public, and facilitating the development of strong, diverse talent in the field.
After seven years as CRA’s Policy Analyst, Melissa Norr will be leaving CRA to begin a new career in library science. Melissa — who worked closely with Peter Harsha, CRA’s Director of Government Affairs, helping shape CRA’s policy mission — will be pursuing her passion for books with a position with the DC Public Library while she finishes a Masters in Library Science at Clarion University.
In her seven years at CRA, Melissa was instrumental in helping CRA and the computing community increase its influence on Capitol Hill and in the Administration. In particular, Melissa led CRA’s robotics and CS education policy efforts, in addition to being the organizing force behind CRA’s successful congressional visits’ days and Congressional Fall Fly-in events.
While she will be sorely missed by her friends and colleagues at CRA and in the science advocacy community, we wish all the best for her as she embarks on her new career in the library.
The folks behind the 2013 Golden Goose Awards have put together a really nice video highlighting this year’s winners. You may recall that the Golden Goose Awards were the brainchild of Rep. Jim Cooper (D-TN) who had grown frustrated with the occasional targeting by his colleagues in Congress of so-called “silly-sounding science” — shrimp on treadmills, towel-folding robots, things that are easy to mock unless you understand the science behind the “silliness,” which many critics didn’t. So the Golden Goose Awards seek to highlight research that might have sounded silly at the outset, but have returned enormous payoff, often in unexpected ways. This year’s video is well-produced and well worth watching!
Every year, AAAS administers the Science & Technology Policy Fellowship program, which brings over 200 scientists and engineers to DC each year to work for the federal government. The goal of the Fellowship is to educate scientists on how the government works and to explore the intersection where policy and science meet.
AAAS has recently launched a Big Data & Analytics track in the Fellowship program to focus on the analytical skills necessary for using big data to tackle the most pressing policy issues of the day such as infrastructure, security, and health care. They would love to see more representation from the computer science community!
Applicants must have a doctorate in a scientific, medical, or engineering discipline. The deadline to apply for the 2014-2015 Fellowship program is November 1. Visit AAAS S&T Policy Fellowship for details on the program and how to apply.
It has just been announced that Dr. John Eng will receive the next Golden Goose Award. Dr. Eng’s research on the Gila Monster’s poisonous venom at the Department of Veterans Affairs led to a drug that protects millions of diabetics from such complications as blindness, kidney failure, and nerve damage.
In 1992, Dr. Eng discovered a compound that he named “Exendin-4.” According to the press release, the compound stimulates insulin-producing cells in the pancreas to produce more insulin when glucose levels are high. The compound keeps the body’s blood sugar levels at a steady, normal level while minimizing, compared to an insulin shot, the risk of levels going too low. In 2005 the FDA approved the drug called “Byetta,” developed as a result of his federally-funded research.
The Golden Goose Award “was created in 2012 to celebrate researchers whose seemingly odd or obscure federally funded research turned out to have a significant, positive impact on society.” Dr. Eng will receive the award at the second annual Golden Goose Awards ceremony in Washington, DC.
Each organization spoke about the need for such STEM initiatives as well as current initiatives each organization sponsors. For example, in 2011 the AAU launched a five-year initiative in collaboration with member institutions to improve undergraduate teaching and learning in STEM fields. This initiative received a $4.7 million grant to be distributed across the university sites over the next three years. Among the participating institutions are the University of Pennsylvania and the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. The goal is to create a strong network between these institutions to share best practices and “promote sustainable change in undergraduate STEM teaching and learning.”
The Progressive Policy Institute recently released their report, authored by Everett Ehrlich, on the progressive policy agenda for the broadband market. The report touched on three main sections: what progressives should want from the internet, the current state of competition in the broadband sector, and what the progressive agenda should look like.
In the first section, Ehrlich discusses how the “activists” in the progressive community believe that the broadband providers have “undue market influence,” which will stifle innovation and hurt consumers in the long run. In their opinion, since the internet can lead to social and political empowerment if harnessed correctly, regulation is a must. For progressives, the threat of market power “would not only produce economic losses, but would undermine the Internet’s existence as a source of empowerment of the individual and countervailing power for underrepresented groups in society.” Read more →
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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!
CRA is Hiring: Be part of CRA’s Policy Staff!
/In: CRA, People /by Peter HarshaCRA is hiring! We’re looking for a new Policy Analyst on our Government Affairs staff. If you’re interested in helping the computing research community make its case in Washington, or know someone who is, please see the ad below!
CRA Bids Farewell to Melissa Norr
/In: General /by Shar SteedIn her seven years at CRA, Melissa was instrumental in helping CRA and the computing community increase its influence on Capitol Hill and in the Administration. In particular, Melissa led CRA’s robotics and CS education policy efforts, in addition to being the organizing force behind CRA’s successful congressional visits’ days and Congressional Fall Fly-in events.
While she will be sorely missed by her friends and colleagues at CRA and in the science advocacy community, we wish all the best for her as she embarks on her new career in the library.
Golden Goose Award Video
/In: General, Policy, R&D in the Press /by Peter HarshaThe folks behind the 2013 Golden Goose Awards have put together a really nice video highlighting this year’s winners. You may recall that the Golden Goose Awards were the brainchild of Rep. Jim Cooper (D-TN) who had grown frustrated with the occasional targeting by his colleagues in Congress of so-called “silly-sounding science” — shrimp on treadmills, towel-folding robots, things that are easy to mock unless you understand the science behind the “silliness,” which many critics didn’t. So the Golden Goose Awards seek to highlight research that might have sounded silly at the outset, but have returned enormous payoff, often in unexpected ways. This year’s video is well-produced and well worth watching!
Golden Goose Awards 2013 from DOCUinc on Vimeo.
Big Data Fellowship Opportunity
/In: People, Policy, Research /by MelissaNorrAAAS has recently launched a Big Data & Analytics track in the Fellowship program to focus on the analytical skills necessary for using big data to tackle the most pressing policy issues of the day such as infrastructure, security, and health care. They would love to see more representation from the computer science community!
Applicants must have a doctorate in a scientific, medical, or engineering discipline. The deadline to apply for the 2014-2015 Fellowship program is November 1. Visit AAAS S&T Policy Fellowship for details on the program and how to apply.
Award Recipient’s Research on Gila Monster Led to Diabetic Drug
/In: R&D in the Press /by Peter HarshaIt has just been announced that Dr. John Eng will receive the next Golden Goose Award. Dr. Eng’s research on the Gila Monster’s poisonous venom at the Department of Veterans Affairs led to a drug that protects millions of diabetics from such complications as blindness, kidney failure, and nerve damage.
In 1992, Dr. Eng discovered a compound that he named “Exendin-4.” According to the press release, the compound stimulates insulin-producing cells in the pancreas to produce more insulin when glucose levels are high. The compound keeps the body’s blood sugar levels at a steady, normal level while minimizing, compared to an insulin shot, the risk of levels going too low. In 2005 the FDA approved the drug called “Byetta,” developed as a result of his federally-funded research.
The Golden Goose Award “was created in 2012 to celebrate researchers whose seemingly odd or obscure federally funded research turned out to have a significant, positive impact on society.” Dr. Eng will receive the award at the second annual Golden Goose Awards ceremony in Washington, DC.
Click here for the entire press release.
Briefing on Undergraduate STEM Intitatives
/In: Computing Education, Policy /by Peter HarshaThe House STEM Education Caucus hosted a briefing on various STEM programs occurring at the undergraduate level, in conjunction with the Association of American Universities (AAU), Association of Public and Land Grant Universities (APLU), the Business Higher Education Forum, and the Research Corporation of Science Advancement.
Each organization spoke about the need for such STEM initiatives as well as current initiatives each organization sponsors. For example, in 2011 the AAU launched a five-year initiative in collaboration with member institutions to improve undergraduate teaching and learning in STEM fields. This initiative received a $4.7 million grant to be distributed across the university sites over the next three years. Among the participating institutions are the University of Pennsylvania and the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. The goal is to create a strong network between these institutions to share best practices and “promote sustainable change in undergraduate STEM teaching and learning.”
These programs come at a time where STEM education is seen as necessary for employment and for the advancement of education in this country.
Report on Progressive Agenda for Broadband Market Released
/In: Policy /by Peter HarshaThe Progressive Policy Institute recently released their report, authored by Everett Ehrlich, on the progressive policy agenda for the broadband market. The report touched on three main sections: what progressives should want from the internet, the current state of competition in the broadband sector, and what the progressive agenda should look like.
In the first section, Ehrlich discusses how the “activists” in the progressive community believe that the broadband providers have “undue market influence,” which will stifle innovation and hurt consumers in the long run. In their opinion, since the internet can lead to social and political empowerment if harnessed correctly, regulation is a must. For progressives, the threat of market power “would not only produce economic losses, but would undermine the Internet’s existence as a source of empowerment of the individual and countervailing power for underrepresented groups in society.” Read more →