The Congressional Budget Resolution — the first real step in the annual appropriations process — has not gotten off to the smoothest of starts. The budget resolution is Congress’ response to the President’s budget request and, if passed, would set the total level of discretionary spending the appropriators would have to hand out over the course of passing their annual appropriations bills. Beyond that top-level number, the rest of the resolution isn’t incredibly significant. The budget resolution is divided into a number of “budget functions” that describe general areas of federal discretionary spending. “Function 250,” for example, is the “General Science, Space and Technology” account, from which NASA, NSF, DOE Office of Science and DHS S&T would ostensibly receive their money. In truth, however, the budget functions described in the Congressional budget resolution only loosely correlate to the final agency appropriations levels.
[Here’s the wonky digression….] If the House and Senate agree on a budget resolution, that top-level discretionary number becomes binding. It’s what’s called the 302(a) allocation, and it would represent the total amount of discretionary funding the government has available to spend this year. From that number, the House and Senate leadership and the respective Appropriations committees have to decide how that money gets parceled out to the appropriations subcommittees, each responsible for a single appropriations bill this year. Confusingly, the subcommittee jurisdictions don’t line up neatly with the budget functions laid out in the resolution, however. Three different subcommittees, for example, are responsible for agencies that receive funding from the Function 250 account mentioned above: the Science, State, Justice, Commerce (or, more confusingly, just the Commerce, Science, Justice committee in the Senate) subcommittee; the Energy and Water subcommittee; and the Homeland Security subcommittee. Since the budget resolution doesn’t specify funding levels for particular agencies, the appropriators and leadership sort of, well, wing it when it comes to parceling out the 302(b)s. Ok, it’s not quite winging it, but they do only use the budget resolution to “advise” the process, not direct it explicitly.
So, why does this all matter then? And what’s going on with the budget resolution this year?
The budget resolution is a prime indicator of the political climate for various funding issues. It’s the first clear opportunity we get to assess the mood of the two parties — and maybe more importantly, the various factions within the parties — towards funding the programs we care most about. This year’s budget resolution so far tells us that funding for science has strong support in the Senate, strong support from the House Democrats, and not much obvious support from the House GOP leadership. This isn’t terribly surprising given recent events, but it’s also not terribly encouraging as we move forward with the appropriations process.
Here’s where we stand:
The Senate passed its version of the FY 07 budget resolution in mid-March. Included in the Senate resolution is enough funding for the President’s American Competitiveness Initiative, plus some additional spending — $16 billion over the President’s proposed discretionary cap of $873 billion, in part to make up for cuts in Health and Education proposed in the President’s budget.
On March 29, the House Budget Committee passed a more parsimonious version of the resolution, sticking to the President’s cap, but not guaranteeing budget space for the President’s ACI. In the House version, the account that would include funding for the ACI-targeted agencies (NSF, NIST and DOE Office of Science) along with funding for NASA — the “Function 250” account, for which the President requested $26.3 billion — would receive $300 million less than the President’s request. (In contrast, the Senate included $100 million more than the President’s request for Function 250 in their budget resolution.)
The House leadership was hoping to vote on their resolution two weeks ago, before the Congressional “Spring/Easter Break.” However, that process faltered when two factions of the GOP — the moderates and the appropriators — rebelled and threatened to vote against the measure. The moderates don’t believe the measure provides enough discretionary spending for their priorities (which, for some, include fully-funding the ACI), the appropriators are concerned about language that would force them to get approval from the budget committee before considering any “emergency supplemental” spending bills, which have proven to be attractive vehicles for pork. So the leadership pulled the resolution without allowing a vote and decided to take advantage of the two-week spring Congressional recess to try to make some deals. The leadership plans to continue working this week to strike a deal with enough GOP members to put the resolution to a vote again next week.
Failing to get a deal done could have serious consequences. In the House, it’s actually not too big a problem. In the absence of a deal, the House leadership can “deem” a budget with an $873 billion discretionary cap. It opens them up to charges of being a “do-nothing” Congress from the Democrats and isn’t a great showing by Majority Leader John Boehner (R-OH) in his first budget negotiation, but for all practical purposes, the House leadership would probably be fine with the $873 billion figure.
The Senate doesn’t have the ability to “deem” a final number, however, so failing to reach an agreement would mean that the Senate would be forced to use the FY 07 budget number contained in the FY 06 Budget Resolution passed last year — which would set the discretionary number at $866 billion, $7 billion below the President’s request and $23 billion below the number the Senate passed last month. Finding $23 billion to cut in the President’s budget won’t be easy, and unfortunately, one juicy target would be the increases proposed as part of the ACI.
So, the science community is hoping that a deal can be struck to get the House and Senate numbers a little closer together. The computing community is part of the effort to urge the House leadership to include funding for ACI in the budget resolution, citing the ACI’s importance to computing research and computing research’s significant contribution to current and future American competitiveness. The leadership and supporters of the computing research community have taken advantage of this opportunity to put the case to the House Leadership, at a time when they can take a relatively easy step to address it (all told, the increase for R&D in the ACI is less than $1 billion). Here’s the letter (pdf) that resulted (and was delivered on Friday):
SUPPORTING COMPUTING RESEARCH AND INNOVATION
April 21, 2006
The Honorable Dennis Hastert
Speaker
U.S. House of Representatives
Washington, D.C. 20515
Dear Speaker Hastert,
As leaders and supporters of the computing research community, we write to express our concern that the proposed House Budget Resolution does not assume full funding for President Bushs American Competitiveness Initiative. We respectfully request that Congress embrace this initiative by fully funding the Presidents request in the budget resolution.
Numerous high-profile reports have pointed out the significant challenges that America faces from fierce and growing global competition. The Presidents plan recognizes the critical linkage between the federal investment in fundamental research and the rise in innovation that will be required to respond to these challenges. The Presidents call for increasing investment in basic research in the physical sciences represents a historic opportunity to secure the Nations leadership in research in information technology and other physical sciences and help ensure Americas future competitiveness.
The computing research field is a very concrete example of how federal investments in fundamental research drive economic growth. The field has a long history of creating revolutionary technologies that have enabled entirely new industries and driven productivity growth so critical to U.S. leadership in the new economy. A 2002 National Academies report found that federal support for computing research helped create 19 multibillion-dollar industries and made America the global leader in information technology. Further, several noted economists, including Alan Greenspan have cited the key role that information technology continues to play in driving U.S. productivity. Flat or declining agency budgets supporting computing research have created a significant concern within our community that we will cede these gains and our leadership by putting future innovation at risk.
The Presidents American Competitiveness Initiative provides more funding for the National Science Foundation, the Department of Energys Office of Science, and the core labs program at the National Institute of Standards and Technology. Each agency plays an important role in funding computing research. While the House Budget Resolution does increase funding for sciences broadly, it is not clear that the increase will be enough to fund the Presidents initiative. We specifically ask that the budget resolution allocate enough funding to ensure the Presidents proposal can be met during the appropriations process.
Thank you for considering our request. We look forward to working with you as the Budget Resolution and appropriations for these agencies move through Congress.
Sincerely, The American Association for Artificial Intelligence (AAAI) The Association for Computing Machinery, U.S. Public Policy Committee (USACM) Cisco Systems, Inc. The Coalition for Academic Scientific Computation (CASC) The Computing Research Association (CRA) The Electrical and Computer Engineering Department Heads Association (ECEDHA) Intel Corporation Microsoft Corporation The Society for Industrial and Applied Mathematics (SIAM)
Thanks especially to Cisco, Intel and Microsoft who put some of their political capital on the line to sign on to this important message. Their presence is very good news for our efforts and lends considerable weight to this letter.
Also good news is the fact that the President continues to tour the country making the case for the ACI. Last week the President stumped on the issue at a high school in Maryland, at Tuskegee Institute, and at Cisco in Silicon Valley. Tom Abate of the San Francisco Chroniclehas coverage of the President’s visit to Cisco. The visit spawned this very supportive editorial in the San Jose Mercury News. Here’s a snippet:
As the president himself pointed out at Tuskegee University on Wednesday, it was through federally funded research that “the Internet came to be.” Other fruits of government-funded research include search technologies that spawned companies like Google, microprocessors breakthroughs that turned Apple, Sun Microsystems and Silicon Graphics into powerhouses, and countless technological advances that delivered enormous benefits to the economy. Future research in new energy technologies, for example, could help reduce America’s dependence on foreign oil and turn the nation into a world leader in clean energy.
And without the investment, America’s eroding ability to compete globally is certain to deteriorate further. Nations such as China and India, Russia, Ireland and countless others are emerging as economic powers in part because they are willing to invest in themselves, in the education of their children and in the training of their workers.
…
The seeds of America’s prosperity over the past few decades were planted in the late 1950s, when the launch of Sputnik by the Soviet Union prodded President Eisenhower to call for massive investments in education, infrastructure and research. The time to secure our children’s prosperity is now.
The President’s continued efforts and the support of industry (pdf) are crucially important in getting ACI enacted and the funding levels called for in the initiative appropriated. As that last pdf points out, the amounts we’re talking about here are not large — indeed, in the context of the federal budget they are quite literally a rounding error — and yet the potential payoff is dramatic. Hopefully the leadership will figure that out as they decide on their allocations….
The National Science and Technology Council, the cabinet-level council that coordinates S&T policies across the Federal Government, released (pdf) its plan for federal investment in cyber security research and development today. The 121-page report (pdf), called Federal Plan for Cyber Security and Information Assurance Research and Development, “sets out a framework for multi-agency coordination of Federal R&D investments in technologies that can better secure the interconnected computing systems, networks, and information that together make up the U.S. information technology (IT) infrastructure.” Here’s more from their release (pdf):
“This country’s IT infrastructure — which includes not only the public Internet but also the networking and IT systems that control critical infrastructures ranging from power grids to emergency communications systems — is vital not only to our national and homeland security but to our economic security,” said John H. Marburger III, Science Adviser to the President and Director of the Office of Science and Technology Policy. “This report provides a blueprint for coordination of Federal R&D across agencies that will maximize the impact of investments in this key area of the national interest.”
The Federal Plan for Cyber Security and Information Assurance outlines strategic objectives for coordinated Federal R&D in cyber security and information assurance (CSIA). The Plan presents a broad range of CSIA R&D technical topics and identifies those topics that are multi- agency technical and funding priorities. The Plans findings and recommendations address R&D priority-setting, coordination, fundamental R&D, emerging technologies, roadmapping, and metrics. Together with commentaries about the CSIA R&D technical topics that describe their significance, the current state of the art, and gaps in current capabilities, these elements provide a baseline for implementing the Plans recommendations.
Findings and Recommendations Strategic interagency R&D is needed to strengthen the cyber security and information assurance of the Nations IT infrastructure. Planning and conducting such R&D will require concerted Federal activities on several fronts as well as collaboration with the private sector. The specifics of the strategy proposed in this Plan are articulated in a set of findings and recommendations. Presented in greater detail in the report, these findings and recommendations are summarized as follows:
1. Target Federal R&D investments to strategic cyber security and information assurance needs — Federal cyber security and information assurance R&D managers should reassess the Nations strategic and longer-term cyber security and information assurance needs to ensure that Federal R&D addresses those needs and avoids areas in which the private sector is productively engaged.
2. Focus on threats with the greatest potential impact — Federal agencies should focus cyber security and information assurance R&D investments on high- impact threats as well as on investigation of innovative approaches to increasing the overall security and information assurance of IT systems.
3. Make cyber security and information assurance R&D both an individual agency and an interagency budget priority — Agencies should consider cyber security and information assurance R&D policy guidance as they address their mission-related R&D requirements. To achieve the greatest possible benefit from investments throughout the Federal government, cyber security and information assurance R&D should have high priority for individual agencies as well as for coordinated interagency efforts.
4. Support sustained interagency coordination and collaboration on cyber security and information assurance R&D — Sustained coordination and collaboration among agencies will be required to accomplish the goals identified in this Plan. The CSIA IWG should continue to be the primary vehicle for this R&D coordination and collaboration.
5. Build security in from the beginning — The Federal cyber security and information assurance R&D portfolio should support fundamental R&D exploring inherently more secure next-generation technologies that will replace todays patching of the current insecure infrastructure.
6. Assess security implications of emerging information technologies — The Federal government should assess the security implications and the potential impact of R&D results in new information technologies as they emerge in such fields as optical computing, quantum computing, and pervasively embedded computing.
7. Develop a roadmap for Federal cyber security and information assurance — R&D Agencies should use this Plans technical priorities and investment analyses to work with the private sector to develop a roadmap of cyber security and information assurance R&D priorities. This effort should emphasize coordinated agency activities that address technical and investment gaps and should accelerate development of strategic capabilities.
8. Develop and apply new metrics to assess cyber security and information assurance — As part of roadmapping, Federal agencies should develop and implement a multiagency plan to support the R&D for a new generation of methods and technologies for cost-effectively measuring IT component, network, and system security.
9. Institute more effective coordination with the private sector — The Federal government should review private- sector cyber security and information assurance practices and countermeasures to help identify capability gaps in existing technologies, and should engage the private sector in efforts to better understand private-sector views on cyber security and information assurance R&D priorities. Federal agencies supporting cyber security and information assurance R&D should improve communication and coordination with operators of both Federal and private-sector critical infrastructures with shared interests. Information exchange and outreach activities that accelerate technology transition should be integral parts of Federal cyber security and information assurance R&D activities.
10. Strengthen R&D partnerships, including those with international partners — The Federal government should foster a broad partnership of government, the IT industry, researchers, and private-sector users to develop, test, and deploy a more secure next-generation Internet. The Federal government should initiate this partnership by holding a national workshop to solicit views and guidance on cyber security and information assurance R&D needs from stakeholders outside of the Federal research community. In addition, impediments to collaborative international R&D should be identified and addressed in order to facilitate joint activities that support the common interests of the United States and international partners.
Seems hard to quibble with much of that. As the NCO press release indicates, they’re accepting comments on the report to aid in the “planning of next steps.” Those comments are due by April 28th, so get cracking.
We’ll have more as CRA prepares its comments on the plan (we’ve had strong opinions on the issue in the past).
[Editor’s note: Apologies to regular readers for the lag in posts here recently. Lots going on around town and at CRA HQ — along with some posting fingers that are getting a little worn after 400+ posts over the last couple of years — but things should be better very soon. 🙂 Thanks for the patience!]
The President’s Council of Advisors for Science and Technology (PCAST) met Wednesday in Washington to hear about the state of U.S. and global science and technology, to get updates on the research initiatives under its jurisdiction, and to begin work on the committee’s new responsibility as overseers of the Networking and Information Technology R&D program.
This was the first meeting attended by some of the new members of PCAST — including CRA’s Chair, Dan Reed — who were named last month by the President to augment the committee’s expertise in information technology issues. Reed, the only member of PCAST who served on the now-extinctPresident’s Information Technology Advisory Committee (PITAC), gave a presentation on the work of that former committee as a way of helping the PCAST get a handle on its new responsibilities.
From the discussion that followed, it appears that the committee’s two co-Chairs — John Marburger, Director of OSTP and Floyd Kvamme — hope PCAST’s examination of NITRD includes a good look at the current structure of the initiative’s Program Component Areas to see whether it’s still logical, and perhaps determine some appropriate metrics for gauging the quality and effectiveness of the research investment. The review will be undertaken by PCAST’s Subcommittee on Information Technology Manufacturing and Competitiveness Networking and Information Technology, chaired by George Scalise, president of the Semiconductor Industry Association.
Marburger pointed out that metrics are very important to the President, who wants to measure not only the inputs (how much we spend) for these programs but the outputs (what we get). He thought that folks in the software industry, who had been “so influential” in making the case for basic research to the White House during the run-up to the introduction of the President’s American Competitiveness Initiative, might be very useful in developing some metrics. PCAST ought to reach out to the industry folks who felt so strongly about the need to support basic research, Marburger said, and find out how they measure success.
There was also a lot of discussion of whether workforce considerations — specifically the issue of “outsourcing” — ought to be part of the PCAST review. I think the consensus was that workforce is a competitiveness issue and “competitiveness issues are very relevant.” In part, the workforce issue determines whether the U.S. will continue to be a “center of innovation,” the panelists said, so it’s very important. They also noted the national security component of the workforce debate (how the use of offshore labor impacts applications we depend upon for national security purposes).
Scalise, who will be heading the review effort, said the two questions he wants to keep in mind during the review are: Where is the raw innovation in the field coming from? And to what degree is the ecosystem critical to what happens? All members of the panel seemed to agree that IT research community is central to everything — the economy, health care, national security, the conduct of the sciences — and the federal government ought then to “keep it innovating.”
It’s not clear how this study will move forward yet. The subcommittee met yesterday for the first time to hear from various agency representatives about the PCAs. There was much talk and encouragement from the PCAST co-chairs about adopting the “Technical Advisory Group” model for the IT study, just as PCAST used it for its look at the National Nanotechnology Initiative. The TAG would be a “virtual” advisory committee composed of 30-50 prominent members of the field who could be queried by e-mail or phone about issues before the subcommittee. Kvamme claimed this model worked especially well for the NNI study, though the PCAST executive director wasn’t quite as enthusiastic about it in her update to the committee in January (response rates were less than hoped). Perhaps members of the computing community will be more willing to serve in that role….
The other highlight from Wednesday’s meeting was a presentation from Rolf Lehming, curator of NSF’s incredibly useful 2006 Science and Engineering Indicators. The S&E website has the full overview, which is worth a read, but here are some of the points that jumped out at me during the presentation:
Increasingly, science and technology is seen worldwide as at the core of economic development. Consequently, there has been a broad expansion of S&T activities worldwide.
Growth in S&T activities is ubiquitous, especially in Asia outside Japan.
Europe and Japan are losing world share.
The U.S. is holding its own.
China’s R&D growth is “unprecedented” for any country in recent memory, in part reflecting an large increase in R&D performed by foreign-owned, China-based firms, but also, increasingly, government investment.
Student visas may have turned a corner — though the number of student visas issued is still 25 percent below the pre-9/11 level, the number has risen significantly over the last two years or so.
It’s still somewhat shocking to me to see that the White House is now open to discussing these indicators so prominently, given where they’ve been on the issue for the last five years. Now, if they could only get through to the House leadership….
We’ll obviously have more on the efforts of PCAST as they move forward.
I’m still on vacation, but CRA blogging continues over at the CRA Bulletin, where Jay Vegso has a piece on some new analysis on the “stay rates” of foreign US-degree recipients. One of the concerns surrounding the computing research community’s contribution to U.S. competitiveness is the potential that an increasing percentage of the half of CS doctoral students who are not U.S. citizens will choose to leave the U.S. after earning their degree.
Jay points to a recent study by Michael Finn of the Oak Ridge Institute for Science and Education (done for NSF) that shows that while the stay rates for those students have been surprisingly high (74 percent of temporary visa holders who received doctorates in CS in 2001 were still in the US in 2003), that data seem to suggest a decline in the rate in the years to come:
As Finn points out, though, there are signs that these stay rates have plateaued and may begin to fall. The two-year stay rate for temporary visa holders, while at an all-time high, was the same for the 2001 class as it was for those who graduated in 1999. The one-year stay rate, on the other hand, declined slightly. This followed several years of steady increases. In addition, Finn points out that according to a separate NSF survey, the percentage of foreign doctorate recipients with plans to stay in the US declined each year between 2001 and 2003.
Finns study suggests that stay rates among foreign students have leveled off and may begin to decline. On the one hand, this is not surprising: the rates have been very high and could be expected to reach a limit at some point. However, the next bulletin entry will discuss recent CRA and NSF data that show that the percentage of foreign doctorate students that have found employment outside the US has jumped in the past few years.
Jay’s post has more analysis and a nifty chart, too.
is a comprehensive piece of legislation to get Congress engaged in the business of promoting innovation in America by creating additional incentives for private individuals and businesses to create and rollout new products and services so that America will remain the world leader in innovation,” said Goodlatte. “This legislation also recognizes that government sometimes is the problem – not the answer to the problem – so it also addresses government-imposed hurdles to innovation.”
Here’s what’s included:
Business activity tax simplification;
Attorney accountability changes;
An Innovation Scholarship Program;
“Promotion of R&D” by making permanent the research credit; increase in rates of alternative incremental credit; alternative simplified credit for qualified research expenses’
Health care choice provisions;
and, Health IT promotion.
Sigh.
The bill was actually previewed yesterday at a press conference of the High Tech Working Group attended by a whole slew of Republican House members and the entire Republican House leadership, including Speaker Dennis Hastert (R-IL) and new majority leader John Boehner (R-OH). Among the attendees, the only one who mentioned anything about the need to increase research funding in the physical sciences was Science Committee Chairman Sherwood Boehlert (R-NY). Boehlert emphasized that this innovation package wouldn’t be the only one moving through the House this summer and that he would make sure research funding was addressed in the innovation/competitiveness bills before his committee and in the deliberations of the appropriators this year.
Still, this has very bad “optics,” as they say. The House leadership is clearly behind an innovation plan that bears little resemblance to the one introduced by the President and endorsed by Republicans in the Senate. The House Republican leadership has now had two opportunities to be supportive of bipartisan innovation efforts molded on the recommendations of the NAS and others, and has chosen not to be supportive both times. The first was Majority Leader Boehner’s biting response to a Democratic innovation event held last month, which we covered here.
It will be interesting to see how members of the high-tech industry associations, for whom this Goodlatte plan is ostensibly for, react to this approach. They were, after all, very much supportive of the President’s ACI, the Senate bills, and the Democratic Innovation Agenda (which are all very similar). They’ve gone above and beyond the call of duty in making increased support for research a priority in their own advocacy efforts. But they’re needed again. It’s time for those companies who believe in this cause to pick up the phone and tell the Republican leadership what’s missing from their plan.
Citing ACM’sreport on globalization the New York Times today editorializes on the mismatch between the perception of the high-tech industry job market and the reality.
The Association for Computing Machinery, the professional organization that issued the report, says that there are more information technology jobs today than at the height of the dot-com boom. While 2 to 3 percent of American jobs in the field migrate to other nations each year, new jobs have thus far more than made up for the loss.
…
That picture, of course, stands in contrast with the more familiar gloomy depiction of runaway outsourcing. Perhaps that explains what the report says is declining interest in computer science among American college students. Students may think, Why bother if all the jobs are in India? But the computer sector is booming, while the number of students interested in going into the field is falling.
The industry isn’t gone, but it will be if we don’t start generating the necessary dynamic work force. The association says that higher-end technology jobs like those in research are beginning to go overseas and that policies to “attract, educate and retain the best I.T. talent are critical” to future success. Given the post 9/11 approach to immigration and the state of math and science education in America, that is hardly encouraging.
Information technology jobs won’t go away unless we let them. Computing in the past five years has become, according to the report, “a truly global industry.” In the next few years, jobs won’t just land in our laps. We have nothing to fear but the fear of competing itself.
We covered the report from ACM’s Job Migration Task Force recently in this space. Given the amount of work I know went into it, I’m pleased that the report appears to be having such significant impact. Update: (9:40 am, 3/1) – The Wall Street Journal has a related piece today titled Market is Hot for High-Skilled in Silicon Valley. I assume it’s publicly available. If not, I’ll excerpt it a bit. But the lead tells the story:
Five years after the dot-com bubble burst, job growth has returned to Silicon Valley. But it’s a different kind of growth than in past recoveries, favoring higher-skilled workers.
Today President Bush announced he is planning to appoint CRA Board Chair Dan Reed, to the newly-expanded membership of the President’s Council of Advisors for Science and Technology. Reed, who is Vice-Chancellor of IT and CIO for the University of North Carolina, and Director of the Renaissance Computing Institute, joins 13 other members named as the committee prepares to take on the former functions of the President’s Information Technology Advisory Committee, which was rolled into PCAST by presidential order on September 30, 2005.
Here’s the list of those named by the President today [and affiliation, if known]:
F. Duane Ackerman, of Georgia [CEO, Bell South]
Paul M. Anderson, of Washington [CEO, Duke Energy]
Robert A. Brown, of Massachusetts [Dean of Engineering at MIT]
Nance K. Dicciani, of Pennsylvania [Pres and CEO, Specialty Materials Honeywell]
Richard H. Herman, of Illinois
Martin C. Jischke, of Illinois [President, Purdue University]
Fred Kavli, of California [Physicist, philanthropist]
Daniel A. Reed, of Illinois
Hector de Jesus Ruiz, of Texas [Chairman, AMD]
Stratton D. Sclavos, of California [Chairman, Verisign]
John Brooks Slaughter, of Connecticut [President and CEO, NACME]
Joseph M. Tucci, of New Hampshire [CEO, EMC]
Robert E. Witt, of Alabama [President, Univ of Alabama]
Tadataka Yamada, of Pennsylvania [Chair of R&D at GlaxoSmithKline]
Quite an august group. Hopefully this will give the PCAST sufficient depth in IT to make good progress on the broad review of the NITRD program they seemed to be headed towards at the last meeting.
CRA affiliate organization, the Association for Computing Machinery, today released the results of its year-long, comprehensive study on the globalization and offshoring of software. The study contains six key findings:
Globalization of, and offshoring within, the software industry are deeply connected and both will continue to grow. Key enablers of this growth are information technology itself, the evolution of work and business processes, education, and national policies.
Both anecdotal evidence and economic theory indicate that offshoring between developed and developing countries can, as a whole, benefit both, but competition is intensifying.
While offshoring will increase, determining the specifics of this incrase are difficult given the current quantity, quality, and objectivity of data available. Skepticism is warranted regarding claims about the number of jobs to be offshored and the projected growth of software industries in developing nations.
Standardized jobs are more easily moved from developed to developing countries than are higher-skill jobs. These standardized jobs were the initial focus of offshoring. Today, global competition in higher-end skills, such as research is increasing. These trends have implications for individuals, companies, and countries.
Offshoring magnifies existing risks and creates new and often poorly understood or addressed threats to national security, business property and processes, and individuals’ privacy. While it is unlikely these risks will deter the growth of offshoring, businesses and nations should employ strategies to mitigate them.
To stay competitive in a global IT environment and industry, countries must adopt policies that foster innovation. To this end, policies that improve a country’s ability to attract, educate, and retain the best IT talent are critical. Educational policy and investment is at the core.
The report is pretty weighty, but the executive summary (pdf) does a good job of laying out the central findings in more detail. This issue of job migration is a huge concern within the discipline and there’s lots of FUD spread around on both sides of the debate, so having a report from a respected professional organization like ACM, generated by a Task Force with representatives from academia, industry, government, economics and labor should go a long way towards putting both sides on some firmer ground.
There’s been pretty good coverage of the report already. First, ACM’s U.S. Public Policy Committee has its press release and blog post. The New York Times’ Steve Lohr had the first coverage of the report this morning. Lohr’s piece highlights one of the key messages to come out of the study:
The study concluded that dire predictions of job losses from shifting high-technology work to low-wage nations with strong education systems, like India and China, were greatly exaggerated.
Though international in perspective, the study group found that the most likely prognosis for the United States would be that 2 percent to 3 percent of the jobs in information technology would go offshore annually over the next decade or so.
But more jobs will be created than are lost in the future, they said, as long as the industry in America moves up the economic ladder to do higher-value work typically, applying information technology to other fields, like biology and business. They noted that employment in the information technology industry was higher today than it was at the peak of the dot-com bubble, despite the growth of offshore outsourcing in the last few years.
“The global competition has gotten tougher and we have to run faster,” said Moshe Y. Vardi, co-chair of the study group and a computer scientist at Rice University. “But the notion that information technology jobs are disappearing is just nonsense. The data don’t bear that out.”
Yet the view that job opportunities in computing are dwindling fast is both common and potentially damaging to America’s competitive prowess, according to David A. Patterson, president of the Association for Computing Machinery.
He pointed to the declining interest in computer science as a major among American college students, based on a survey last year of the intentions of students entering college. The results suggested that only 1 in 75 students would major in computer science, compared with 1 in 30 in 2000.
“The perception among high school students and their parents is that the game is over that all computing jobs are going overseas,” observed Mr. Patterson, who is a computer science professor at the University of California, Berkeley. “It’s an extraordinarily widely held misperception.”
The concern, he said, is that misplaced pessimism will deter bright young people from pursuing careers in computing. That, in turn, would erode the skills in a field that is crucial to the nation’s economic competitiveness.
The report also saw coverage in CNN’s Money which was subsequently Slashdotted. I’m sure there will be additional coverage of the report in the coming days.
I’m pleased that a number of CRA volunteers were able to serve on the Task Force, including CRA board members Bill Aspray (who served as the Task Force’s Executive Consultant), Moshe Vardi (the TF Co-Chair), Bobby Schnabel, and Dick Waters, as well as Vijay Gurbaxani, who serves on my Government Affairs Committee, and Stu Zweben, who is instrumental in putting together CRA’s Taulbee Survey. The study was an enormous undertaking, so kudos to ACM for making the effort to advance the debate. The study deserves to be read.
While there has been some progress in straightening out the mess that is the visa process post-9/11, as this Washington Poststory indicates, the situation is still pretty bad for those who have research interests in high-tech areas.
A decision two weeks ago by a U.S. consulate in India to refuse a visa to a prominent Indian scientist has triggered heated protests in that country and set off a major diplomatic flap on the eve of President Bush’s first visit to India.
The incident has also caused embarrassment at the highest reaches of the American scientific establishment, which has worked to get the State Department to issue a visa to Goverdhan Mehta, who said the U.S. consulate in the south Indian city of Chennai told him that his expertise in chemistry was deemed a threat.
…
The consulate told Mehta “you have been denied a visa” and invited him to submit additional information, according to an official at the National Academy of Sciences who saw a copy of the document. Mehta said in a written account obtained by The Washington Post that he was humiliated, accused of “hiding things” and being dishonest, and told that his work is dangerous because of its potential applications in chemical warfare.
Mehta denied that his work has anything to do with weapons. He said that he would provide his passport if a visa were issued, but that he would do nothing further to obtain the document: “If they don’t want to give me a visa, so be it.”
The scientist told Indian newspapers that his dealing with the U.S. consulate was “the most degrading experience of my life.” Mehta is president of the International Council for Science, a Paris-based organization comprising the national scientific academies of a number of countries. The council advocates that scientists should have free access to one another.
As Bill Wulf of the National Academy of Engineering points out later in the article, these consular officials overseas are under tremendous pressure to not make mistakes in deciding who to allow in the country. Still, if the process leads to the summary denial of entry for someone like Mehta, the process clearly needs some work.
“Making the wrong decision would be career-ending, so they play it safe, not really understanding the macroscopic implications of their decision,” Wulf said. “Denying a visa to the president of ICSU is probably as dumb as you can get. This is not the way we can make friends.”
Budget Update: Really Wonky, But Some Good News at the End
/In: American Competitiveness Initiative, FY07 Appropriations, R&D in the Press /by Peter HarshaThe Congressional Budget Resolution — the first real step in the annual appropriations process — has not gotten off to the smoothest of starts. The budget resolution is Congress’ response to the President’s budget request and, if passed, would set the total level of discretionary spending the appropriators would have to hand out over the course of passing their annual appropriations bills. Beyond that top-level number, the rest of the resolution isn’t incredibly significant. The budget resolution is divided into a number of “budget functions” that describe general areas of federal discretionary spending. “Function 250,” for example, is the “General Science, Space and Technology” account, from which NASA, NSF, DOE Office of Science and DHS S&T would ostensibly receive their money. In truth, however, the budget functions described in the Congressional budget resolution only loosely correlate to the final agency appropriations levels.
[Here’s the wonky digression….] If the House and Senate agree on a budget resolution, that top-level discretionary number becomes binding. It’s what’s called the 302(a) allocation, and it would represent the total amount of discretionary funding the government has available to spend this year. From that number, the House and Senate leadership and the respective Appropriations committees have to decide how that money gets parceled out to the appropriations subcommittees, each responsible for a single appropriations bill this year. Confusingly, the subcommittee jurisdictions don’t line up neatly with the budget functions laid out in the resolution, however. Three different subcommittees, for example, are responsible for agencies that receive funding from the Function 250 account mentioned above: the Science, State, Justice, Commerce (or, more confusingly, just the Commerce, Science, Justice committee in the Senate) subcommittee; the Energy and Water subcommittee; and the Homeland Security subcommittee. Since the budget resolution doesn’t specify funding levels for particular agencies, the appropriators and leadership sort of, well, wing it when it comes to parceling out the 302(b)s. Ok, it’s not quite winging it, but they do only use the budget resolution to “advise” the process, not direct it explicitly.
So, why does this all matter then? And what’s going on with the budget resolution this year?
The budget resolution is a prime indicator of the political climate for various funding issues. It’s the first clear opportunity we get to assess the mood of the two parties — and maybe more importantly, the various factions within the parties — towards funding the programs we care most about. This year’s budget resolution so far tells us that funding for science has strong support in the Senate, strong support from the House Democrats, and not much obvious support from the House GOP leadership. This isn’t terribly surprising given recent events, but it’s also not terribly encouraging as we move forward with the appropriations process.
Here’s where we stand:
The Senate passed its version of the FY 07 budget resolution in mid-March. Included in the Senate resolution is enough funding for the President’s American Competitiveness Initiative, plus some additional spending — $16 billion over the President’s proposed discretionary cap of $873 billion, in part to make up for cuts in Health and Education proposed in the President’s budget.
On March 29, the House Budget Committee passed a more parsimonious version of the resolution, sticking to the President’s cap, but not guaranteeing budget space for the President’s ACI. In the House version, the account that would include funding for the ACI-targeted agencies (NSF, NIST and DOE Office of Science) along with funding for NASA — the “Function 250” account, for which the President requested $26.3 billion — would receive $300 million less than the President’s request. (In contrast, the Senate included $100 million more than the President’s request for Function 250 in their budget resolution.)
The House leadership was hoping to vote on their resolution two weeks ago, before the Congressional “Spring/Easter Break.” However, that process faltered when two factions of the GOP — the moderates and the appropriators — rebelled and threatened to vote against the measure. The moderates don’t believe the measure provides enough discretionary spending for their priorities (which, for some, include fully-funding the ACI), the appropriators are concerned about language that would force them to get approval from the budget committee before considering any “emergency supplemental” spending bills, which have proven to be attractive vehicles for pork. So the leadership pulled the resolution without allowing a vote and decided to take advantage of the two-week spring Congressional recess to try to make some deals. The leadership plans to continue working this week to strike a deal with enough GOP members to put the resolution to a vote again next week.
Failing to get a deal done could have serious consequences. In the House, it’s actually not too big a problem. In the absence of a deal, the House leadership can “deem” a budget with an $873 billion discretionary cap. It opens them up to charges of being a “do-nothing” Congress from the Democrats and isn’t a great showing by Majority Leader John Boehner (R-OH) in his first budget negotiation, but for all practical purposes, the House leadership would probably be fine with the $873 billion figure.
The Senate doesn’t have the ability to “deem” a final number, however, so failing to reach an agreement would mean that the Senate would be forced to use the FY 07 budget number contained in the FY 06 Budget Resolution passed last year — which would set the discretionary number at $866 billion, $7 billion below the President’s request and $23 billion below the number the Senate passed last month. Finding $23 billion to cut in the President’s budget won’t be easy, and unfortunately, one juicy target would be the increases proposed as part of the ACI.
So, the science community is hoping that a deal can be struck to get the House and Senate numbers a little closer together. The computing community is part of the effort to urge the House leadership to include funding for ACI in the budget resolution, citing the ACI’s importance to computing research and computing research’s significant contribution to current and future American competitiveness. The leadership and supporters of the computing research community have taken advantage of this opportunity to put the case to the House Leadership, at a time when they can take a relatively easy step to address it (all told, the increase for R&D in the ACI is less than $1 billion). Here’s the letter (pdf) that resulted (and was delivered on Friday):
Thanks especially to Cisco, Intel and Microsoft who put some of their political capital on the line to sign on to this important message. Their presence is very good news for our efforts and lends considerable weight to this letter.
Also good news is the fact that the President continues to tour the country making the case for the ACI. Last week the President stumped on the issue at a high school in Maryland, at Tuskegee Institute, and at Cisco in Silicon Valley. Tom Abate of the San Francisco Chronicle has coverage of the President’s visit to Cisco. The visit spawned this very supportive editorial in the San Jose Mercury News. Here’s a snippet:
The President’s continued efforts and the support of industry (pdf) are crucially important in getting ACI enacted and the funding levels called for in the initiative appropriated. As that last pdf points out, the amounts we’re talking about here are not large — indeed, in the context of the federal budget they are quite literally a rounding error — and yet the potential payoff is dramatic. Hopefully the leadership will figure that out as they decide on their allocations….
Can’t Resist…
/In: Misc. /by Peter HarshaJay Vegso suggested this should load on CRA’s homepage, but I think I can get away with it here.
Yip-yips meet the computer.
NSTC Releases Cyber Security R&D Report
/In: Security /by Peter HarshaThe National Science and Technology Council, the cabinet-level council that coordinates S&T policies across the Federal Government, released (pdf) its plan for federal investment in cyber security research and development today. The 121-page report (pdf), called Federal Plan for Cyber Security and Information Assurance Research and Development, “sets out a framework for multi-agency coordination of Federal R&D investments in technologies that can better secure the interconnected computing systems, networks, and information that together make up the U.S. information technology (IT) infrastructure.” Here’s more from their release (pdf):
The plan builds in part on the work of the now-extinct President’s Information Technology Advisory Committee, which produced a similar report on the issue — Cyber Security: A Crisis of Prioritization (pdf) — last year that we liked very much.
I’ve only just seen the report, so I can’t give any detailed analysis, but here are the report’s ten findings and recommendations from the executive summary:
Seems hard to quibble with much of that. As the NCO press release indicates, they’re accepting comments on the report to aid in the “planning of next steps.” Those comments are due by April 28th, so get cracking.
We’ll have more as CRA prepares its comments on the plan (we’ve had strong opinions on the issue in the past).
[Editor’s note: Apologies to regular readers for the lag in posts here recently. Lots going on around town and at CRA HQ — along with some posting fingers that are getting a little worn after 400+ posts over the last couple of years — but things should be better very soon. 🙂 Thanks for the patience!]
PCAST Starts its PITAC Work
/In: Policy /by Peter HarshaThe President’s Council of Advisors for Science and Technology (PCAST) met Wednesday in Washington to hear about the state of U.S. and global science and technology, to get updates on the research initiatives under its jurisdiction, and to begin work on the committee’s new responsibility as overseers of the Networking and Information Technology R&D program.
This was the first meeting attended by some of the new members of PCAST — including CRA’s Chair, Dan Reed — who were named last month by the President to augment the committee’s expertise in information technology issues. Reed, the only member of PCAST who served on the now-extinct President’s Information Technology Advisory Committee (PITAC), gave a presentation on the work of that former committee as a way of helping the PCAST get a handle on its new responsibilities.
From the discussion that followed, it appears that the committee’s two co-Chairs — John Marburger, Director of OSTP and Floyd Kvamme — hope PCAST’s examination of NITRD includes a good look at the current structure of the initiative’s Program Component Areas to see whether it’s still logical, and perhaps determine some appropriate metrics for gauging the quality and effectiveness of the research investment. The review will be undertaken by PCAST’s Subcommittee on
Information Technology Manufacturing and CompetitivenessNetworking and Information Technology, chaired by George Scalise, president of the Semiconductor Industry Association.Marburger pointed out that metrics are very important to the President, who wants to measure not only the inputs (how much we spend) for these programs but the outputs (what we get). He thought that folks in the software industry, who had been “so influential” in making the case for basic research to the White House during the run-up to the introduction of the President’s American Competitiveness Initiative, might be very useful in developing some metrics. PCAST ought to reach out to the industry folks who felt so strongly about the need to support basic research, Marburger said, and find out how they measure success.
There was also a lot of discussion of whether workforce considerations — specifically the issue of “outsourcing” — ought to be part of the PCAST review. I think the consensus was that workforce is a competitiveness issue and “competitiveness issues are very relevant.” In part, the workforce issue determines whether the U.S. will continue to be a “center of innovation,” the panelists said, so it’s very important. They also noted the national security component of the workforce debate (how the use of offshore labor impacts applications we depend upon for national security purposes).
Scalise, who will be heading the review effort, said the two questions he wants to keep in mind during the review are: Where is the raw innovation in the field coming from? And to what degree is the ecosystem critical to what happens? All members of the panel seemed to agree that IT research community is central to everything — the economy, health care, national security, the conduct of the sciences — and the federal government ought then to “keep it innovating.”
It’s not clear how this study will move forward yet. The subcommittee met yesterday for the first time to hear from various agency representatives about the PCAs. There was much talk and encouragement from the PCAST co-chairs about adopting the “Technical Advisory Group” model for the IT study, just as PCAST used it for its look at the National Nanotechnology Initiative. The TAG would be a “virtual” advisory committee composed of 30-50 prominent members of the field who could be queried by e-mail or phone about issues before the subcommittee. Kvamme claimed this model worked especially well for the NNI study, though the PCAST executive director wasn’t quite as enthusiastic about it in her update to the committee in January (response rates were less than hoped). Perhaps members of the computing community will be more willing to serve in that role….
The other highlight from Wednesday’s meeting was a presentation from Rolf Lehming, curator of NSF’s incredibly useful 2006 Science and Engineering Indicators. The S&E website has the full overview, which is worth a read, but here are some of the points that jumped out at me during the presentation:
It’s still somewhat shocking to me to see that the White House is now open to discussing these indicators so prominently, given where they’ve been on the issue for the last five years. Now, if they could only get through to the House leadership….
We’ll obviously have more on the efforts of PCAST as they move forward.
Stay Rates for S&E Doctorates Level Off
/In: People /by Peter HarshaI’m still on vacation, but CRA blogging continues over at the CRA Bulletin, where Jay Vegso has a piece on some new analysis on the “stay rates” of foreign US-degree recipients. One of the concerns surrounding the computing research community’s contribution to U.S. competitiveness is the potential that an increasing percentage of the half of CS doctoral students who are not U.S. citizens will choose to leave the U.S. after earning their degree.
Jay points to a recent study by Michael Finn of the Oak Ridge Institute for Science and Education (done for NSF) that shows that while the stay rates for those students have been surprisingly high (74 percent of temporary visa holders who received doctorates in CS in 2001 were still in the US in 2003), that data seem to suggest a decline in the rate in the years to come:
Jay’s post has more analysis and a nifty chart, too.
House Republicans Ignore R&D in Innovation and Competitiveness Bill
/In: American Competitiveness Initiative, Funding, FY07 Appropriations, Policy /by Peter HarshaDemonstrating how much work remains to be done with the House Republican leadership, the House Republican “High-tech Task Force” led by Rep. Bob Goodlatte (R-VA) today introduced its “Innovation and Competitiveness Act,” which wholly ignores the central recommendation of the President’s American Competitiveness Initiative, two bi-partisan bills in the Senate, the National Academies “Gathering Storm” report, and just about every high-tech industry association (pdf), by not including any commitment to increase funding for fundamental research in the physical sciences.
Instead, Goodlatte’s bill
Here’s what’s included:
Sigh.
The bill was actually previewed yesterday at a press conference of the High Tech Working Group attended by a whole slew of Republican House members and the entire Republican House leadership, including Speaker Dennis Hastert (R-IL) and new majority leader John Boehner (R-OH). Among the attendees, the only one who mentioned anything about the need to increase research funding in the physical sciences was Science Committee Chairman Sherwood Boehlert (R-NY). Boehlert emphasized that this innovation package wouldn’t be the only one moving through the House this summer and that he would make sure research funding was addressed in the innovation/competitiveness bills before his committee and in the deliberations of the appropriators this year.
Still, this has very bad “optics,” as they say. The House leadership is clearly behind an innovation plan that bears little resemblance to the one introduced by the President and endorsed by Republicans in the Senate. The House Republican leadership has now had two opportunities to be supportive of bipartisan innovation efforts molded on the recommendations of the NAS and others, and has chosen not to be supportive both times. The first was Majority Leader Boehner’s biting response to a Democratic innovation event held last month, which we covered here.
It will be interesting to see how members of the high-tech industry associations, for whom this Goodlatte plan is ostensibly for, react to this approach. They were, after all, very much supportive of the President’s ACI, the Senate bills, and the Democratic Innovation Agenda (which are all very similar). They’ve gone above and beyond the call of duty in making increased support for research a priority in their own advocacy efforts. But they’re needed again. It’s time for those companies who believe in this cause to pick up the phone and tell the Republican leadership what’s missing from their plan.
NY Times Editorial: Outsourcing Isn’t as Bad as You Think
/In: R&D in the Press /by Peter HarshaCiting ACM’s report on globalization the New York Times today editorializes on the mismatch between the perception of the high-tech industry job market and the reality.
We covered the report from ACM’s Job Migration Task Force recently in this space. Given the amount of work I know went into it, I’m pleased that the report appears to be having such significant impact.
Update: (9:40 am, 3/1) – The Wall Street Journal has a related piece today titled Market is Hot for High-Skilled in Silicon Valley. I assume it’s publicly available. If not, I’ll excerpt it a bit. But the lead tells the story:
CRA Chair Named to PCAST
/In: CRA, Policy /by Peter HarshaToday President Bush announced he is planning to appoint CRA Board Chair Dan Reed, to the newly-expanded membership of the President’s Council of Advisors for Science and Technology. Reed, who is Vice-Chancellor of IT and CIO for the University of North Carolina, and Director of the Renaissance Computing Institute, joins 13 other members named as the committee prepares to take on the former functions of the President’s Information Technology Advisory Committee, which was rolled into PCAST by presidential order on September 30, 2005.
Here’s the list of those named by the President today [and affiliation, if known]:
Quite an august group. Hopefully this will give the PCAST sufficient depth in IT to make good progress on the broad review of the NITRD program they seemed to be headed towards at the last meeting.
ACM Job Study: Despite Offshoring, IT Job Growth Should be Strong
/In: Policy /by Peter HarshaCRA affiliate organization, the Association for Computing Machinery, today released the results of its year-long, comprehensive study on the globalization and offshoring of software. The study contains six key findings:
The report is pretty weighty, but the executive summary (pdf) does a good job of laying out the central findings in more detail. This issue of job migration is a huge concern within the discipline and there’s lots of FUD spread around on both sides of the debate, so having a report from a respected professional organization like ACM, generated by a Task Force with representatives from academia, industry, government, economics and labor should go a long way towards putting both sides on some firmer ground.
There’s been pretty good coverage of the report already. First, ACM’s U.S. Public Policy Committee has its press release and blog post. The New York Times’ Steve Lohr had the first coverage of the report this morning. Lohr’s piece highlights one of the key messages to come out of the study:
The report also saw coverage in CNN’s Money which was subsequently Slashdotted. I’m sure there will be additional coverage of the report in the coming days.
I’m pleased that a number of CRA volunteers were able to serve on the Task Force, including CRA board members Bill Aspray (who served as the Task Force’s Executive Consultant), Moshe Vardi (the TF Co-Chair), Bobby Schnabel, and Dick Waters, as well as Vijay Gurbaxani, who serves on my Government Affairs Committee, and Stu Zweben, who is instrumental in putting together CRA’s Taulbee Survey. The study was an enormous undertaking, so kudos to ACM for making the effort to advance the debate. The study deserves to be read.
Visa Issues: Still a long way to go
/In: People, Policy, R&D in the Press /by Peter HarshaWhile there has been some progress in straightening out the mess that is the visa process post-9/11, as this Washington Post story indicates, the situation is still pretty bad for those who have research interests in high-tech areas.
As Bill Wulf of the National Academy of Engineering points out later in the article, these consular officials overseas are under tremendous pressure to not make mistakes in deciding who to allow in the country. Still, if the process leads to the summary denial of entry for someone like Mehta, the process clearly needs some work.
You can read the whole thing here.