The President released his FY12 Budget Request to Congress this morning. We’ll take close-up looks at several of the key science agency budget requests as the day goes on, but here’s a first look at the overall picture. From the Analytical Perspectives on the Budget:
The Administration recognizes the Government’s role in fostering scientific and technological breakthroughs, and has committed resources to ensure America leads the world in the innovations of the future. The Budget proposes $66 billion for basic and applied research because it is a reliable source of new knowledge to drive job creation and economic growth.
The President’s 2012 Budget maintains his commitment to double Federal investment in key basic research agencies: the National Science Foundation (NSF); the Department of Energy (DOE) Office of Science; and the laboratories of the Department of Commerce (DOC) National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST). The Budget proposes $14 billion in 2012 for these three agencies, an increase of $1.5 billion over 2010 funding. Priorities for 2012 include clean energy and advanced manufacturing research in areas such as information technology, nanotechnology, and biotechnology at NSF, basic energy sciences at DOE, and cybersecurity, biomanufacturing, and innovative energy technologies at NIST.
The Federal R&D effort needs complementary R&D investments from business to provide a much wider range of technology options than the Government alone could provide and to translate scientific discoveries into commercially successful, innovative products and services. In order to provide businesses with greater confidence to invest, innovate, and grow, the Budget proposes to simplify and expand the Research and Experimentation tax credit, and make it permanent.
Some quick agency-specific numbers:
NSF would see a 16 percent increase in R&D vs. FY10 (the FY11 year isn’t available for comparison yet because Congress hasn’t finished it).
Energy research would see an increase of 20 percent vs. FY10
NASA R&D overall would increase 6 percent, and NASA basic research would grow 220 percent from $835 million to $2.7 billion…but only because construction on the International Space Station is complete, so any resources to operate this new “national lab” are considered “basic research”
Defense basic research would see an increase of 14 percent, applied would decrease 4 percent.
NIH research would increase 3 percent.
Of course, this budget is essentially “dead on arrival” as far as the House is concerned. But it’s still important to have a good request from the President and the agencies on record when we go advocating for the science agencies during the FY12 appropriations process.
We’ll have lots more as we go through a day of briefings…
The House Appropriations Committee released their spending cuts version 2.0 — after having their previous attempt to cut $74 billion from the President’s request for non-defense discretionary spending savaged by conservative Republicans in the House — and NSF and DOE both face significant cuts. The appropriators went back and took another look at their first proposal, which cut about $74 billion from the President’s budget request, and found another $26 billion. The new proposed cuts mean real cuts for agency budgets (not just cuts to requested increases).
Here’s a list of the proposed cuts in the CR, which will be taken up on Monday in a vehicle that combines the CR and the FY 11 Defense Appropriation.
Notable cuts for science:
National Science Foundation’s Research and Related Activities account – cut $150 million compared to NSF’s FY10 budget.
NSF’s Major Research Equipment and Facilities Construction – cut $62.5 million vs. FY 10.
NSF’s Education and Human Resources – cut $147 million vs. FY 10.
DOE’s Office of Science – cut $893 million.
DOE’s Energy Efficiency and Renewable Energy – cut $786 million
NIST’s Scientific and Technical Research Services – cut $45.5 million
About the only positive — and that’s a very qualified positive — is that ARPA-E does manage to get an appropriation in the bill ($50 million), averting some concerns that the agency would receive $0. That’s significantly lower than their original funding of $400 million, but the agency is in an awkward spot because it has never had a “normal” appropriation (it was authorized in the America COMPETES Act and given a one-time appropriation in the 2009 stimulus bill), so a CR could very well have included no funding for it.
We’ll have more as we figure it out, but these numbers show the community has a lot of work to do in the House and Senate to prevent the country from taking a big step backwards in trying to improve our long-term innovative potential….
Update: Um, nevermind. After conservative Republicans savaged the proposed $32 billion in cuts as inadequate, House Appropriations Chairman Hal Rogers pledged to come back with a proposal that would cut $100 billion, potentially putting NSF right back under the crosshairs. Here’s Roger’s statement:
My Committee has been working diligently to go line-by-line in every agency budget to find and cut unnecessary spending to reduce our deficit and help our economy thrive.
After meeting with my subcommittee Chairs, we have determined that the CR can and will reach a total of $100 billion in cuts compared to the President’s request immediately – fully meeting the goal outlined in the Republican ‘Pledge to America’ in one fell swoop. Our intent is to make deep but manageable cuts in nearly every area of government, leaving no stone unturned and allowing no agency or program to be held sacred. I have instructed my committee to include these deeper cuts, and we are continuing to work to complete this critical legislation.
We’ll have more when we learn more.
Original Post: As readers of this blog are no doubt aware, Congress has not yet finished the FY 11 appropriations process, leaving federal agencies in funding limbo, despite being five months into FY 11 fiscal year. Starting Monday, House appropriators hope to start the process of resolving the FY 11 budget by passing a “continuing resolution” for the remainder of the fiscal year that will make significant cuts to the budgets of a lot of key agencies. The GOP leadership of the House Appropriations Committee today released a list of some key cuts they plan to make and science agencies aren’t spared — with two notable exceptions.
The list of cuts is available here.
It’s important to keep in mind that the cuts are to the President’s requested budget for FY 11, not to the agency’s FY 10 budgets. In many cases, the President requested substantial increases for these programs, so the “cuts” listed here are actually just reductions to the level of increase requested. The agency might still fare better than it did in FY 10.
The National Science Foundation is targeted for $139 million in “cuts” in the proposal. However, the President requested an increase of $479 million for the agency in FY 11, so in real terms, NSF would see an *increase* of $340 million in FY 11 vs FY 10, or about 6.0 percent. That’s pretty astonishing, given the circumstances. (more on that below)
DOE Office of Science is the other side of the coin, though. They’re slated for $1.1 billion in cuts in the proposal. The President requested an increase of only $226 million for the agency in FY 11, so the proposed cuts are a real cut of $874 million (or 18 percent) to the Science budget compared to FY 10. DOE’s Energy Efficiency and Renewable Energy account would get hit even harder, suffering a $786 million real cut, or 35 percent.
The National Institute of Standards and Technology is another loser, receiving almost 15 percent in real cuts in the proposal, though as always, it’s difficult to assess where the cuts will fall (will they hit the controversial TIP or MEP programs, or NIST’s core research?).
NASA is a big winner in the proposal. The GOP leadership wants a “cut” of $379 million for the agency, but the President requested an increase of $1.7 billion for the agency. So, the agency still would clear $1.3 billion in new funding in FY 11 vs. FY 10 (14 percent increase).
NIH would be flat funded in real terms by the proposal.
So, encouraging news for NSF, but very bad news for DOE. Also, these numbers aren’t final. There are a many proposed cuts that hit very politically charged accounts, like the Community Oriented Policing Services (COPS) program (which, among other things, funds the purchase of bulletproof vests for police officers) and the food assistance program for low-income women, infants and children. If appropriators are forced to back off cuts to those accounts (and others), they may look for other places to achieve the same savings, which could put NSF back in the crosshairs.
But, looking on the bright side, the fact that even in this fiscally harsh environment — this huge laundry list of belt-tightening — NSF was still singled out for special treatment (and increases) is a pretty important symbol. It perhaps means that the GOP leadership still understands that there’s value in the investment in NSF — that an investment in NSF probably provides more real return to the country than it costs. So there’s a little reason for optimism amongst the carnage. But apparently they haven’t gotten that message about DOE….
On Monday we’ll also get our first look at the President’s budget proposal for FY 12. Given the high prominence he gave research and education issues in his State of the Union address last month, and the degree to which he’s been touring the country the last two weeks talking up the importance of innovation to America’s future, it’s likely that we’ll see some healthy requests for science funding. But achieving those increases in this Congress and this fiscal environment is likely to be an extremely steep climb. But stay tuned because we’ll have all the details here.
The President delivered his annual State of the Union address this evening and made innovation – and the research and education investments that enable it – the central focus of nearly the first 25 minutes of it. It’s hard to quote just a part of it – I’d encourage you to read the whole thing, though the first three pages are pretty key for the science advocacy community.
Giving research and education issues such prominent mentions in the speech is both a blessing and a curse, perhaps. Talking about the importance of these investments 25 mins before he focused the current budget crisis shows the priority his Administration places on them. He was clearly making the case that, even in these fiscally worrisome times where budget-slashing is likely to be the norm, federal investments in research and education have huge payoffs and ought to be protected. But in making the case so prominently, he painted a huge target on research and education funding for Republicans as symbols of the “big government” Democrats are trying to continue to fund, even while the need for cutting spending has never been greater. (That overall federal spending for basic research in the U.S. represents barely a blip in the overall budget picture is largely immaterial. Symbolically, it’s spending, and reducing it means reducing “the size of government.”)
Here are two key quotes that I think show the divergence of views and approaches. From the State of the Union:
We know what it takes to compete for the jobs and industries of our time. We need to out-innovate, out-educate, and out-build the rest of the world. We have to make America the best place on Earth to do business. We need to take responsibility for our deficit, and reform our government. That’s how our people will prosper. That’s how we’ll win the future. And tonight, I’d like to talk about how we get there.
The first step in winning the future is encouraging American innovation.
…
This is our generation’s Sputnik moment. Two years ago, I said that we needed to reach a level of research and development we haven’t seen since the height of the Space Race. In a few weeks, I will be sending a budget to Congress that helps us meet that goal. We’ll invest in biomedical research, information technology, and especially clean energy technology – an investment that will strengthen our security, protect our planet, and create countless new jobs for our people.
And from the Republican response, given by House Budget Committee Chair, Paul Ryan (R-WI):
We are at a moment, where if government’s growth is left unchecked and unchallenged, America’s best century will be considered our past century. This is a future in which we will transform our social safety net into a hammock, which lulls able-bodied people into lives of complacency and dependency.
Depending on bureaucracy to foster innovation, competitiveness, and wise consumer choices has never worked — and it won’t work now.
We need to chart a new course.
So it’s a pretty stark division. The science community has its work cut out making the case to Republicans to understand the value of federal investments in fundamental research and education. The President made a good start at it. It’s up to us now to talk about the impact of the computing community – a community in which nearly every major subfield, every major billion-dollar sector of the market, bears the stamp of federal support for research. I hope you’ll help!
Tom Kalil, Deputy Director for Policy at the Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP), discusses the importance of IT R&D from the perspective of the Administration. He talks about the huge impact that IT has on the economy as a whole as well as on productivity and on other scientific disciplines. He also discusses the unbreakable connections between IT and national priorities such as health care, education, energy and national security.
Tom Leighton, Professor of Applied Mathematics, MIT, and Co-Founder and Chief Scientist of Akamai Technologies, discusses his experience doing high-risk, basic research for DARPA and how it led to the founding of a company and better Internet reliability for consumers and government.
Robert Atkinson, President of the Information Technology and Innovation Foundation, discusses many aspects of the report including the concerns that IT R&D needs to be more than supercomputers and that a portion of the money included as IT R&D is really going toward NIT infrastructure instead of research. He also makes note that there are 20 new billion dollar industries related to IT created in the last couple of decades but that we are not investing enough in basic research to compete going forward.
Today the House voted to pass a revised version of the America COMPETES Act, a bill that would reauthorize several key science agencies and STEM Education programs, completing an unlikely resurrection of a bill most in the science advocacy community (including this correspondent) figured was dead in this session.
COMPETES has been through quite a legislative rollercoaster on its trip through Congress and has emerged at the end significantly leaner. The version the House granted final approval of today has been trimmed significantly since its original passage — the Senate having shed the bill of a number of controversial tech-transfer and tech-innovation programs, cut the authorization amounts for NSF, NIST and DOE Office of Science, and removed the Networking and Information Technology R&D (NITRD) Program reauthorization and the National Nanotechnology Initiative (NNI) from the package. The resulting “clean” package was far more palatable to Senate Republicans who had opposed the House version of the bill, and the Senate was able to find time on its calendar late on Sunday to pass the bill by unanimous consent.
Unfortunately, the Senate managed to find time on its calendar because the Democratic leadership wasn’t able to strike a deal on passage of a Omnibus Appropriations bill that would have contained — along with funding for all the operations of government — real funding increases for NSF and NIST in FY 11. Instead, the Senate leadership pulled the omnibus legislation and has passed a so-called “Continuing Resolution” (CR) that would keep the government running at the FY 10 budget levels through March 4, 2011. The House is expected to agree to the March 4th CR this evening.
But despite actual appropriations being left up in the air for science agencies, it is still symbolic that both chambers decided to use precious closing-session floor time to debate and ultimately authorize increases for science funding. Advocates for science can now at least point to these authorized levels as a target for appropriators as the new Congress convenes in January.
And what did legislators ultimately approve? The Alliance for Science and Technology Research in America (ASTRA) has put together a handy comparison chart (pdf) showing the various authorization levels approved along COMPETES bumpy path. In short, here’s where NSF and NIST finished up:
National Science Foundation: Authorized for three years with a total increase of nearly 20 percent over the three years, compared to the agency’s FY 10 budget. Under the plan, NSF would grow by 7.2 percent in FY 11.
National Institute of Standards and Technology: Authorized for three years with a total increase of 21.4 percent over FY 10. Under the plan NIST would grow 7.3 percent in FY 11.
DOE Office of Science: Authorizes a 14 percent increase in DOE’s R&D programs over three years. Includes $900 million in authorization for DOE’s Advanced Research Projects Agency (ARPA-E) over three years.
The bill passed by a vote of 228 to 130, on an essentially party-line vote. Sixteen Republicans did cross the aisle to vote for the measure, though.
We’ll have more on what’s actually in the revised COMPETES Act in a future post. For now, the bill’s passage is about the only cause for celebration we’re likely to get as this Congress comes to a close. And given the changing tenor in Washington, it may be the only thing we celebrate for much of the next one, too…
Update: (12/22/2010) — The White House has weighed in. A snippet:
Passage of the Act comes at a crucial time in our Nation’s economic and technological trajectory—a time that President Obama characterized last month as a “Sputnik moment.” Just as Americans in 1957 quickly grasped the significance of the Soviet Union’s historic launch of the world’s first artificial satellite—responding aggressively with new investments in research and development (R&D) and science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) education—Americans today are recognizing that we are once again on the brink of a new world. The decisions we make today about how we invest in R&D, education, innovation, and competitiveness will profoundly influence our Nation’s economic vitality, global stature, and national security tomorrow.
The final PCAST report, “Designing a Digital Future,” appears essentially unchanged from the report presented to the committee last month and which we’ve detailed previously. The committee reviewed $4 billion, 14-agency Networking and Information Technology and Research and Development (NITRD) program and found that while it handles coordination of the agency programs “very successfully,” it’s not particularly effective at providing vision or strategic leadership for the federal effort. Among its recommendations, PCAST calls for the creation of a new standing committee, housed in some unspecified place in the Administrative branch and comprised of experts in IT from academia and industry, to help guide NITRD and provide strategic advice for the program. PCAST also found that current budget reporting mechanisms in use by NITRD don’t accurately detail the federal investment in IT R&D. As we noted in that previous post, much of what gets reported by participating NITRD agencies as “IT R&D” is actually “IT that’s used in R&D in other fields,” a fact which leads to a substantial overstatement of the true federal investment in IT research. A review of NIH’s investment, for example, found that of the over $1 billion the NIH reported to NITRD as IT R&D for FY09, only 2 to 11 percent of it could actually be described as true IT research. The rest was more accurately described as IT infrastructure used to support research in other fields.
PCAST’s report also recommends significant new investments in research areas that will advance national priorities — like health, energy, transportation and education — as well as research aimed at advancing specific research frontiers in IT. Our colleague Erwin Gianchandani has a detailed look at some of the research areas recommended by PCAST over at the CCC blog.
One other interesting recommendation – in light of the recent news of a Chinese supercomputer heading the list of the world’s fastest – is the panel’s call for the U.S. to abandon the competition to stay atop the Top500 rankings based on FLOPS (floating point operations per second). Calling it “an arms race we don’t really find beneficial,” PCAST member David Shaw derided FLOPS as a metric for high-performance computing. Shaw and PCAST NITRD Working Group Co-Chair Ed Lazowska (who also Chairs CRA’s Computing Community Consortium) both noted the finishing at the top of the Top500 is exceptionally expensive and doesn’t necessarily guarantee you’ll build a machine that’s particularly useful. Far more valuable a priority, Shaw noted, is to invest in research that could allow for a leap-frog of current high-performance computing technology. “We need to make sure we don’t allow procurement to crowd out research funding,” he said.
Administration Chief Technology Officer Aneesh Chopra ran the lively briefing, calling on fellow advisors Vivek Kundra, the administration’s Chief Information Officer; Phil Weiser, Senior Advisor for Technology and Innovation to the National Economic Council Director; and Tom Kalil, Deputy Director for Policy of the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy, to testify to the impact of IT on government, on the U.S. economy, and on making progress on national priorities like energy, transportation, health and national security.
Kalil summed up the Administration’s position on why IT R&D is so important with four succinct points:
The IT revolution is far from over — there are many core challenges in computing still to addressed that have the potential to revolutionize further our economy, our standard of living, our national defense;
Information and communication technologies (ICT) are accelerating the pace of discovery in more and more disciplines; in fact, some disciplines like astronomy are becoming information-based fields;
ICT has had and continues to have a huge impact on our economy – a point discussant Robert Atkinson of the Information Technology and Innovation Foundation amplified later in the briefing, noting that ITIF research showed that IT’s contribution to the U.S. economy is worth $2 trillion annually, and that IT jobs between 1999-2008 grew 4 times faster than non-IT jobs;
And, ICT has a role in every one of our national priorities, including health, education, energy, transportation, open government.
Kalil also noted the reasons why it’s important the federal government continues to invest substantially in IT research. The payoff from the federal investment in IT research historically has been dramatic – every billion-dollar subsector of the IT economy bears the stamp of federal support for research. Investment in basic research isn’t attractive to industry for a host of different reasons, not the least of which being that because of the nature of fundamental research, it’s nearly impossible for firms to capture all the benefit from their research investment. He also pointed out that many areas of IT research are critical to the missions of government agencies. And he noted that an investments in university research not only often produce good ideas, but just as importantly, they produce people – the next generation of scientists, engineers and entrepreneurs who will power our future.
In all, the briefing was a great showcase for the esteem in which the Administration holds IT research and its contributions to the nation. As federal budgets tighten, its crucial that U.S. policymakers understand that there are areas in which the U.S. must be allowed to maintain its science leadership, and it appears that the message that IT is one of those areas has gotten through to PCAST and to the White House.
The briefing is available as a webcast and well worth watching. The two “independent” discussants on the panel – Atkinson and Tom Leighton, founder of Akamai Technologies – are particularly worth a look (towards the last third of the broadcast).
In the coming year, we’ll keep an eye on how the recommendations of the committee fare and have all the details here.
Steven Aftergood, of the always excellent Secrecy News blog, notes the release of a new report by the JASON panel, an influential, independent advisory committee for the Department of Defense that focuses on issues in science and technology, on the “Science of Cyber Security.” Specifically, DOD asked the panel to examine the theory and practice of cyber security, and “evaluate whether there are underlying fundamental principals that would make it possible to adopt a more scientific approach.”
The committee has released their report on the issue (the Federation of American Scientists managed to obtain a copy (pdf)), have concluded that there is a science of cyber security, but it “seems underdeveloped in reporting experimental results, and consequently in the ability to use them.” The primary recommendation of the committee is to have the DOD sponsor “multiple cyber-security science based centers and projects within universities and other research centers.” The programs should have “a long time horizon and periodic reviews of accomplishments.”
Centers, the panel believes, have several attractive features:
they give the sponsors access to the best ideas and people;
they give the sponsor a chance to bias the work towards their versions of common problems;
there is an opportunity for these centers and programs to leverage a unique collection of resources internal to the DOD, including defensive data and experience from running internal networks.
The centers would be different than DARPAs projects in that the centers “would be expected to make steady progress on a broad set of topics, rather than limit themselves to revolutionary ideas or to try to solve the latest cyber-security crisis.”
Centers would also act as connecting points for the software industry, which would accelerate the translation of new ideas into useful tools for developers. The panel believes that this would correct a long-standing deficiency wherein some very sophisticated approaches to assessing and reasoning about the security of current systems are not available in the form of developer tools, perhaps because there’s insufficient market for the private development of the tools.
A number of representatives from academia, industry and government briefed JASON on the issues, including CRA’s Government Affairs Chair Fred Schneider.
JASON reports often form the basis of action within DOD on S&T matters, and there’s no reason to suggest that the recommendations in this report won’t get consideration. Whether the investment in centers actually happens is, of course, also dependent on the DOD’s budget situation, which is in a bit of flux at the moment until Congress hammers out a final agreement on an FY 11 budget and the Administration releases its plan for FY 12. But it wouldn’t be surprising to see an effort to incorporate the reports recommendations in future DOD budgets.
In any case, the report is well-written and well worth a read.
President Obama yesterday invoked the specter of a “Sputnik moment” in competitiveness facing the country and re-emphasized his commitment to invest in innovation, infrastructure and education during a speech in North Carolina.
Here’s the meat:
You go to Shanghai, China, and they’ve built more high-speed rail in the last year than we’ve built in the last 30 years. The largest private solar research and development facility in the world was recently opened in China -– by an American company. Today China also has the fastest trains and the fastest supercomputer in the world.
In 1957, just before this college opened, the Soviet Union beat us into space by launching a satellite known as Sputnik. And that was a wake-up call that caused the United States to boost our investment in innovation and education -– particularly in math and science. And as a result, once we put our minds to it, once we got focused, once we got unified, not only did we surpass the Soviets, we developed new American technologies, industries, and jobs.
So 50 years later, our generation’s Sputnik moment is back. This is our moment. If the recession has taught us anything, it’s that we cannot go back to an economy that’s driven by too much spending, too much borrowing, running up credit cards, taking out a lot of home equity loans, paper profits that are built on financial speculation. We’ve got to rebuild on a new and stronger foundation for economic growth.
We need to do what America has always been known for: building, innovating, educating, making things. We don’t want to be a nation that simply buys and consumes products from other countries. We want to create and sell products all over the world that are stamped with three simple words: “Made In America.” That’s our goal.
…
That’s why even as we scour the budget for cuts and savings in the months ahead, I will continue to fight for those investments that will help America win the race for the jobs and industries of the future -– and that means investments in education and innovation and infrastructure. I will be fighting for that.
…
We’ve got to have a long-term vision about where we want to be 10 years from now, 20 years from now, 30 years from now.
You can read the entire speech here and watch it here.
The Computing Community Consortium (CCC) is seeking nominations, including self-nominations, for visionary leaders to serve a three-year term on the CCC Council. The Council chair is currently Ed Lazowska and Susan Graham is the vice-chair.
Council members are appointed by CRA and NSF for staggered three-year terms. In the aggregate, the Council must reflect the full breadth of the computing research community – research area, institutional character, etc. Details on the role of CCC, as well as the current composition of the Council, may be found on the CCC web page. The CCC is funded by NSF under a cooperative agreement with CRA.
Please send suggestions, together with the information below, to Eric Grimson (welg at csail dot mit dot edu) by December 15th. This committee’s recommendations will serve as input to CRA and NSF, who are responsible for making the final selection.
1. Name, affiliation, and email address of the nominee.
2. Research interests.
3. Previous significant service to the research community and other relevant experience, with years it occurred (no more than *five* items).
4. A brief biography or curriculum vitae of the nominee.
5. A statement from the nominee of less than 1 page, supporting his or her nomination by describing his or her ideas for, and commitment to, advancing the work of the CCC in engaging broader communities, finding wider funding sources, and encouraging new research directions. Remember that the CCC needs truly visionary leaders — people with lots of great ideas, sound judgment, and the willingness to work hard to see things to completion.
The CCC is charged with mobilizing the computing research community to answer these questions by identifying major research opportunities for the field, and by creating venues for community participation in this process. The CCC supports these efforts through advocacy with federal agencies, through visioning activities such as workshops, through arranging plenary talks on key topics at major venues, and through other community building activities.
Please use the Category and Archive Filters below, to find older posts. Or you may also use the search bar.
IT Research Remains a Priority in President’s FY12 Budget Request
/In: Funding, FY12 Appropriations /by Peter HarshaThe President released his FY12 Budget Request to Congress this morning. We’ll take close-up looks at several of the key science agency budget requests as the day goes on, but here’s a first look at the overall picture. From the Analytical Perspectives on the Budget:
Some quick agency-specific numbers:
NSF would see a 16 percent increase in R&D vs. FY10 (the FY11 year isn’t available for comparison yet because Congress hasn’t finished it).
Energy research would see an increase of 20 percent vs. FY10
NASA R&D overall would increase 6 percent, and NASA basic research would grow 220 percent from $835 million to $2.7 billion…but only because construction on the International Space Station is complete, so any resources to operate this new “national lab” are considered “basic research”
Defense basic research would see an increase of 14 percent, applied would decrease 4 percent.
NIH research would increase 3 percent.
Of course, this budget is essentially “dead on arrival” as far as the House is concerned. But it’s still important to have a good request from the President and the agencies on record when we go advocating for the science agencies during the FY12 appropriations process.
We’ll have lots more as we go through a day of briefings…
House Approps Proposes Even More Cuts for NSF, DOE
/In: Funding, FY11 Appropriations, Policy /by Peter HarshaThe House Appropriations Committee released their spending cuts version 2.0 — after having their previous attempt to cut $74 billion from the President’s request for non-defense discretionary spending savaged by conservative Republicans in the House — and NSF and DOE both face significant cuts. The appropriators went back and took another look at their first proposal, which cut about $74 billion from the President’s budget request, and found another $26 billion. The new proposed cuts mean real cuts for agency budgets (not just cuts to requested increases).
Here’s a list of the proposed cuts in the CR, which will be taken up on Monday in a vehicle that combines the CR and the FY 11 Defense Appropriation.
Notable cuts for science:
National Science Foundation’s Research and Related Activities account – cut $150 million compared to NSF’s FY10 budget.
NSF’s Major Research Equipment and Facilities Construction – cut $62.5 million vs. FY 10.
NSF’s Education and Human Resources – cut $147 million vs. FY 10.
DOE’s Office of Science – cut $893 million.
DOE’s Energy Efficiency and Renewable Energy – cut $786 million
NIST’s Scientific and Technical Research Services – cut $45.5 million
About the only positive — and that’s a very qualified positive — is that ARPA-E does manage to get an appropriation in the bill ($50 million), averting some concerns that the agency would receive $0. That’s significantly lower than their original funding of $400 million, but the agency is in an awkward spot because it has never had a “normal” appropriation (it was authorized in the America COMPETES Act and given a one-time appropriation in the 2009 stimulus bill), so a CR could very well have included no funding for it.
We’ll have more as we figure it out, but these numbers show the community has a lot of work to do in the House and Senate to prevent the country from taking a big step backwards in trying to improve our long-term innovative potential….
NSF Fares (Suprisingly) Well, DOE Does Not, in Proposed Approps Cuts for FY11
/In: Funding, FY11 Appropriations, FY12 Appropriations, Policy /by Peter HarshaUpdate: (Feb 11, 2011) – They’ve released version 2.0 of the proposal…
Update: Um, nevermind. After conservative Republicans savaged the proposed $32 billion in cuts as inadequate, House Appropriations Chairman Hal Rogers pledged to come back with a proposal that would cut $100 billion, potentially putting NSF right back under the crosshairs. Here’s Roger’s statement:
Original Post: As readers of this blog are no doubt aware, Congress has not yet finished the FY 11 appropriations process, leaving federal agencies in funding limbo, despite being five months into FY 11 fiscal year. Starting Monday, House appropriators hope to start the process of resolving the FY 11 budget by passing a “continuing resolution” for the remainder of the fiscal year that will make significant cuts to the budgets of a lot of key agencies. The GOP leadership of the House Appropriations Committee today released a list of some key cuts they plan to make and science agencies aren’t spared — with two notable exceptions.
The list of cuts is available here.
It’s important to keep in mind that the cuts are to the President’s requested budget for FY 11, not to the agency’s FY 10 budgets. In many cases, the President requested substantial increases for these programs, so the “cuts” listed here are actually just reductions to the level of increase requested. The agency might still fare better than it did in FY 10.
The National Science Foundation is targeted for $139 million in “cuts” in the proposal. However, the President requested an increase of $479 million for the agency in FY 11, so in real terms, NSF would see an *increase* of $340 million in FY 11 vs FY 10, or about 6.0 percent. That’s pretty astonishing, given the circumstances. (more on that below)
DOE Office of Science is the other side of the coin, though. They’re slated for $1.1 billion in cuts in the proposal. The President requested an increase of only $226 million for the agency in FY 11, so the proposed cuts are a real cut of $874 million (or 18 percent) to the Science budget compared to FY 10. DOE’s Energy Efficiency and Renewable Energy account would get hit even harder, suffering a $786 million real cut, or 35 percent.
The National Institute of Standards and Technology is another loser, receiving almost 15 percent in real cuts in the proposal, though as always, it’s difficult to assess where the cuts will fall (will they hit the controversial TIP or MEP programs, or NIST’s core research?).
NASA is a big winner in the proposal. The GOP leadership wants a “cut” of $379 million for the agency, but the President requested an increase of $1.7 billion for the agency. So, the agency still would clear $1.3 billion in new funding in FY 11 vs. FY 10 (14 percent increase).
NIH would be flat funded in real terms by the proposal.
So, encouraging news for NSF, but very bad news for DOE. Also, these numbers aren’t final. There are a many proposed cuts that hit very politically charged accounts, like the Community Oriented Policing Services (COPS) program (which, among other things, funds the purchase of bulletproof vests for police officers) and the food assistance program for low-income women, infants and children. If appropriators are forced to back off cuts to those accounts (and others), they may look for other places to achieve the same savings, which could put NSF back in the crosshairs.
But, looking on the bright side, the fact that even in this fiscally harsh environment — this huge laundry list of belt-tightening — NSF was still singled out for special treatment (and increases) is a pretty important symbol. It perhaps means that the GOP leadership still understands that there’s value in the investment in NSF — that an investment in NSF probably provides more real return to the country than it costs. So there’s a little reason for optimism amongst the carnage. But apparently they haven’t gotten that message about DOE….
On Monday we’ll also get our first look at the President’s budget proposal for FY 12. Given the high prominence he gave research and education issues in his State of the Union address last month, and the degree to which he’s been touring the country the last two weeks talking up the importance of innovation to America’s future, it’s likely that we’ll see some healthy requests for science funding. But achieving those increases in this Congress and this fiscal environment is likely to be an extremely steep climb. But stay tuned because we’ll have all the details here.
Research and Education Take Center Stage in SOTU
/In: Economic Stimulus and Recovery, Funding, FY11 Appropriations, Policy, R&D in the Press /by Peter HarshaThe President delivered his annual State of the Union address this evening and made innovation – and the research and education investments that enable it – the central focus of nearly the first 25 minutes of it. It’s hard to quote just a part of it – I’d encourage you to read the whole thing, though the first three pages are pretty key for the science advocacy community.
Giving research and education issues such prominent mentions in the speech is both a blessing and a curse, perhaps. Talking about the importance of these investments 25 mins before he focused the current budget crisis shows the priority his Administration places on them. He was clearly making the case that, even in these fiscally worrisome times where budget-slashing is likely to be the norm, federal investments in research and education have huge payoffs and ought to be protected. But in making the case so prominently, he painted a huge target on research and education funding for Republicans as symbols of the “big government” Democrats are trying to continue to fund, even while the need for cutting spending has never been greater. (That overall federal spending for basic research in the U.S. represents barely a blip in the overall budget picture is largely immaterial. Symbolically, it’s spending, and reducing it means reducing “the size of government.”)
Here are two key quotes that I think show the divergence of views and approaches. From the State of the Union:
And from the Republican response, given by House Budget Committee Chair, Paul Ryan (R-WI):
So it’s a pretty stark division. The science community has its work cut out making the case to Republicans to understand the value of federal investments in fundamental research and education. The President made a good start at it. It’s up to us now to talk about the impact of the computing community – a community in which nearly every major subfield, every major billion-dollar sector of the market, bears the stamp of federal support for research. I hope you’ll help!
NITRD Report Release Videos
/In: Events, People, Policy, Research /by MelissaNorrAs noted over at the CCC blog, the presentations during the President’s Council of Advisors on Science and Technology issued Networking and Information Technology Research and Development (NITRD) report roll out are available in online videos. These eight short videos are all worth watching but three are of particular note.
Tom Kalil, Deputy Director for Policy at the Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP), discusses the importance of IT R&D from the perspective of the Administration. He talks about the huge impact that IT has on the economy as a whole as well as on productivity and on other scientific disciplines. He also discusses the unbreakable connections between IT and national priorities such as health care, education, energy and national security.
Tom Leighton, Professor of Applied Mathematics, MIT, and Co-Founder and Chief Scientist of Akamai Technologies, discusses his experience doing high-risk, basic research for DARPA and how it led to the founding of a company and better Internet reliability for consumers and government.
Robert Atkinson, President of the Information Technology and Innovation Foundation, discusses many aspects of the report including the concerns that IT R&D needs to be more than supercomputers and that a portion of the money included as IT R&D is really going toward NIT infrastructure instead of research. He also makes note that there are 20 new billion dollar industries related to IT created in the last couple of decades but that we are not investing enough in basic research to compete going forward.
America COMPETES Rises From Ashes; However, Appropriations Punted to February
/In: Funding, FY11 Appropriations, Policy /by Peter HarshaToday the House voted to pass a revised version of the America COMPETES Act, a bill that would reauthorize several key science agencies and STEM Education programs, completing an unlikely resurrection of a bill most in the science advocacy community (including this correspondent) figured was dead in this session.
COMPETES has been through quite a legislative rollercoaster on its trip through Congress and has emerged at the end significantly leaner. The version the House granted final approval of today has been trimmed significantly since its original passage — the Senate having shed the bill of a number of controversial tech-transfer and tech-innovation programs, cut the authorization amounts for NSF, NIST and DOE Office of Science, and removed the Networking and Information Technology R&D (NITRD) Program reauthorization and the National Nanotechnology Initiative (NNI) from the package. The resulting “clean” package was far more palatable to Senate Republicans who had opposed the House version of the bill, and the Senate was able to find time on its calendar late on Sunday to pass the bill by unanimous consent.
Unfortunately, the Senate managed to find time on its calendar because the Democratic leadership wasn’t able to strike a deal on passage of a Omnibus Appropriations bill that would have contained — along with funding for all the operations of government — real funding increases for NSF and NIST in FY 11. Instead, the Senate leadership pulled the omnibus legislation and has passed a so-called “Continuing Resolution” (CR) that would keep the government running at the FY 10 budget levels through March 4, 2011. The House is expected to agree to the March 4th CR this evening.
But despite actual appropriations being left up in the air for science agencies, it is still symbolic that both chambers decided to use precious closing-session floor time to debate and ultimately authorize increases for science funding. Advocates for science can now at least point to these authorized levels as a target for appropriators as the new Congress convenes in January.
And what did legislators ultimately approve? The Alliance for Science and Technology Research in America (ASTRA) has put together a handy comparison chart (pdf) showing the various authorization levels approved along COMPETES bumpy path. In short, here’s where NSF and NIST finished up:
The bill passed by a vote of 228 to 130, on an essentially party-line vote. Sixteen Republicans did cross the aisle to vote for the measure, though.
We’ll have more on what’s actually in the revised COMPETES Act in a future post. For now, the bill’s passage is about the only cause for celebration we’re likely to get as this Congress comes to a close. And given the changing tenor in Washington, it may be the only thing we celebrate for much of the next one, too…
Update: (12/22/2010) — The White House has weighed in. A snippet:
Here’s the whole post.
White House Offers Strong Show of Support for PCAST IT R&D Findings
/In: Events, Policy, Research /by Peter HarshaThe Nation’s CTO and CIO joined other key White House advisors at a briefing today to announce the release of the President’s Council of Advisors for Science and Technology (PCAST) report on the state of federal IT research and development and offered a strong words of support for the role of information technology in driving the economy, enabling the sciences and accelerating the pace of discovery, and addressing national priorities.
The final PCAST report, “Designing a Digital Future,” appears essentially unchanged from the report presented to the committee last month and which we’ve detailed previously. The committee reviewed $4 billion, 14-agency Networking and Information Technology and Research and Development (NITRD) program and found that while it handles coordination of the agency programs “very successfully,” it’s not particularly effective at providing vision or strategic leadership for the federal effort. Among its recommendations, PCAST calls for the creation of a new standing committee, housed in some unspecified place in the Administrative branch and comprised of experts in IT from academia and industry, to help guide NITRD and provide strategic advice for the program. PCAST also found that current budget reporting mechanisms in use by NITRD don’t accurately detail the federal investment in IT R&D. As we noted in that previous post, much of what gets reported by participating NITRD agencies as “IT R&D” is actually “IT that’s used in R&D in other fields,” a fact which leads to a substantial overstatement of the true federal investment in IT research. A review of NIH’s investment, for example, found that of the over $1 billion the NIH reported to NITRD as IT R&D for FY09, only 2 to 11 percent of it could actually be described as true IT research. The rest was more accurately described as IT infrastructure used to support research in other fields.
PCAST’s report also recommends significant new investments in research areas that will advance national priorities — like health, energy, transportation and education — as well as research aimed at advancing specific research frontiers in IT. Our colleague Erwin Gianchandani has a detailed look at some of the research areas recommended by PCAST over at the CCC blog.
One other interesting recommendation – in light of the recent news of a Chinese supercomputer heading the list of the world’s fastest – is the panel’s call for the U.S. to abandon the competition to stay atop the Top500 rankings based on FLOPS (floating point operations per second). Calling it “an arms race we don’t really find beneficial,” PCAST member David Shaw derided FLOPS as a metric for high-performance computing. Shaw and PCAST NITRD Working Group Co-Chair Ed Lazowska (who also Chairs CRA’s Computing Community Consortium) both noted the finishing at the top of the Top500 is exceptionally expensive and doesn’t necessarily guarantee you’ll build a machine that’s particularly useful. Far more valuable a priority, Shaw noted, is to invest in research that could allow for a leap-frog of current high-performance computing technology. “We need to make sure we don’t allow procurement to crowd out research funding,” he said.
Administration Chief Technology Officer Aneesh Chopra ran the lively briefing, calling on fellow advisors Vivek Kundra, the administration’s Chief Information Officer; Phil Weiser, Senior Advisor for Technology and Innovation to the National Economic Council Director; and Tom Kalil, Deputy Director for Policy of the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy, to testify to the impact of IT on government, on the U.S. economy, and on making progress on national priorities like energy, transportation, health and national security.
Kalil summed up the Administration’s position on why IT R&D is so important with four succinct points:
Kalil also noted the reasons why it’s important the federal government continues to invest substantially in IT research. The payoff from the federal investment in IT research historically has been dramatic – every billion-dollar subsector of the IT economy bears the stamp of federal support for research. Investment in basic research isn’t attractive to industry for a host of different reasons, not the least of which being that because of the nature of fundamental research, it’s nearly impossible for firms to capture all the benefit from their research investment. He also pointed out that many areas of IT research are critical to the missions of government agencies. And he noted that an investments in university research not only often produce good ideas, but just as importantly, they produce people – the next generation of scientists, engineers and entrepreneurs who will power our future.
In all, the briefing was a great showcase for the esteem in which the Administration holds IT research and its contributions to the nation. As federal budgets tighten, its crucial that U.S. policymakers understand that there are areas in which the U.S. must be allowed to maintain its science leadership, and it appears that the message that IT is one of those areas has gotten through to PCAST and to the White House.
The briefing is available as a webcast and well worth watching. The two “independent” discussants on the panel – Atkinson and Tom Leighton, founder of Akamai Technologies – are particularly worth a look (towards the last third of the broadcast).
In the coming year, we’ll keep an eye on how the recommendations of the committee fare and have all the details here.
JASON on “Science of Cyber Security,” Recommends New Centers
/In: Policy, Research, Security /by Peter HarshaSteven Aftergood, of the always excellent Secrecy News blog, notes the release of a new report by the JASON panel, an influential, independent advisory committee for the Department of Defense that focuses on issues in science and technology, on the “Science of Cyber Security.” Specifically, DOD asked the panel to examine the theory and practice of cyber security, and “evaluate whether there are underlying fundamental principals that would make it possible to adopt a more scientific approach.”
The committee has released their report on the issue (the Federation of American Scientists managed to obtain a copy (pdf)), have concluded that there is a science of cyber security, but it “seems underdeveloped in reporting experimental results, and consequently in the ability to use them.” The primary recommendation of the committee is to have the DOD sponsor “multiple cyber-security science based centers and projects within universities and other research centers.” The programs should have “a long time horizon and periodic reviews of accomplishments.”
Centers, the panel believes, have several attractive features:
The centers would be different than DARPAs projects in that the centers “would be expected to make steady progress on a broad set of topics, rather than limit themselves to revolutionary ideas or to try to solve the latest cyber-security crisis.”
Centers would also act as connecting points for the software industry, which would accelerate the translation of new ideas into useful tools for developers. The panel believes that this would correct a long-standing deficiency wherein some very sophisticated approaches to assessing and reasoning about the security of current systems are not available in the form of developer tools, perhaps because there’s insufficient market for the private development of the tools.
A number of representatives from academia, industry and government briefed JASON on the issues, including CRA’s Government Affairs Chair Fred Schneider.
JASON reports often form the basis of action within DOD on S&T matters, and there’s no reason to suggest that the recommendations in this report won’t get consideration. Whether the investment in centers actually happens is, of course, also dependent on the DOD’s budget situation, which is in a bit of flux at the moment until Congress hammers out a final agreement on an FY 11 budget and the Administration releases its plan for FY 12. But it wouldn’t be surprising to see an effort to incorporate the reports recommendations in future DOD budgets.
In any case, the report is well-written and well worth a read.
President Continues Push for Innovation
/In: Funding, Policy /by MelissaNorrPresident Obama yesterday invoked the specter of a “Sputnik moment” in competitiveness facing the country and re-emphasized his commitment to invest in innovation, infrastructure and education during a speech in North Carolina.
Here’s the meat:
You can read the entire speech here and watch it here.
CCC Council Nominations Needed
/In: Computing Community Consortium (CCC) /by MelissaNorrThe Computing Community Consortium (CCC) is seeking nominations, including self-nominations, for visionary leaders to serve a three-year term on the CCC Council. The Council chair is currently Ed Lazowska and Susan Graham is the vice-chair.
Council members are appointed by CRA and NSF for staggered three-year terms. In the aggregate, the Council must reflect the full breadth of the computing research community – research area, institutional character, etc. Details on the role of CCC, as well as the current composition of the Council, may be found on the CCC web page. The CCC is funded by NSF under a cooperative agreement with CRA.
Please send suggestions, together with the information below, to Eric Grimson (welg at csail dot mit dot edu) by December 15th. This committee’s recommendations will serve as input to CRA and NSF, who are responsible for making the final selection.
1. Name, affiliation, and email address of the nominee.
2. Research interests.
3. Previous significant service to the research community and other relevant experience, with years it occurred (no more than *five* items).
4. A brief biography or curriculum vitae of the nominee.
5. A statement from the nominee of less than 1 page, supporting his or her nomination by describing his or her ideas for, and commitment to, advancing the work of the CCC in engaging broader communities, finding wider funding sources, and encouraging new research directions. Remember that the CCC needs truly visionary leaders — people with lots of great ideas, sound judgment, and the willingness to work hard to see things to completion.
The CCC is charged with mobilizing the computing research community to answer these questions by identifying major research opportunities for the field, and by creating venues for community participation in this process. The CCC supports these efforts through advocacy with federal agencies, through visioning activities such as workshops, through arranging plenary talks on key topics at major venues, and through other community building activities.