Computing Research Policy Blog

CNET: “Research Money Crunch in the U.S.”


Marguerite Reardon writes in CNET News.com what’s becoming a very familiar refrain:

An outspoken group of information and communications technology innovators is worried that the United States is falling behind the rest of the world in technological innovation because fewer dollars are being allocated to long-term research.

The piece does a good job of laying out concerns of the computing research community, which should be very familiar to readers of this blog.

Many in the research community also believe that the research being conducted today is too focused on short-term, market-oriented results. The current DARPA policy, which mandates 12-month “go, no go” research milestones for information technology, has shortened deadlines, thus discouraging long-term research. And with more research focused on national security, programs formerly open to academics are now classified. DARPA has also slashed spending on academic research.
“Traditionally funding in computer sciences has come from the U.S. government,” Kleinrock said. “And it’s contributed to some remarkable advances, such as the Internet and artificial intelligence. They (the government) used to step back and with some direction let you go develop something new. But that’s not the case today. And DARPA is no longer thinking long-range.”
More competition, fewer dollars
The effects have been significant. In the last five years, IT proposals to the National Science Foundation jumped from 2,000 to 6,500, forcing the agency to leave many proposals unfunded. Other agencies, such as NASA, have also reduced spending on communications research. Since most government funding comes only from these two sources, researchers are flocking toward the NSF as DARPA cuts back or changes its priorities.

Read the whole thing here. And check here or here for good collections of similar stories that have run this year.

NSF Does Well (All Things Considered) in Conference?


The House and Senate just reached agreement on the FY 06 Commerce, Justice, Science Appropriations bill and it appears NSF will receive just over a 3 percent bump over FY 05. Details are a bit scant at the moment, but it appears NSF will receive $5.65 billion in FY 06 — that’s $10 million more than the House approved in its version of the bill, $50 million over the President’s request, and $120 million over the Senate number.
There are still a couple of unknowns at the moment — whether the agreement means CJS is safe from across-the-board cuts that are still possible, and the disposition of a transfer of Coast Guard ships to NSF that could effect the overall NSF number — but NSF is in a much better situation at the moment than most of us thought was possible at this point.
More details as they emerge….
Update (4:20 pm, 11/4): Here are some of the specific numbers (compare to this chart for previously approved House and Senate levels):
NSF Overall – $5,653.27 million. That’s 3.3 percent above FY05 and nearly one percent about the President’s request.
Research and Related Activities: $4,387.52 million. That’s 4 percent above FY05 and 1.2 percent above the President’s request.
Major Research Equipment and Facilities Construction: $193.35 million. Equal to the House and Senate versions.
Education and Human Resources: $807 million. That’s equal to the House number, 9.5 percent higher than the President’s request, and includes $4 million above the President’s request for the Math and Science Partnership.
Salaries and Expenses: $250 million. 12 percent above FY05 but 7 percent below the President’s request.
Office of the Inspector General: $11.5 million
National Science Board: $4 million
An across-the-board cut still looms. The Conference appears to have exceeded its spending target for the bill, so there will likely be some across-the-board cut to repair the problem before the bill is actually filed on Monday. According to NSF, appropriations staff indicate that the cut would amount to no more than 0.3 percent at this point (which would mean NSF would lose approximately $17 million of the funding gained above), leaving them with about a 3 percent gain overall.
Even with the possibility of a 0.3 percent across the board cut, NSF fared very well — exceeding even the high mark originally laid down by the House Appropriations committee last May. Credit for this improvement in fortune has to go to the coalitions and individuals who have advocated strongly for better support for basic science even in the face of an ugly, ugly budget environment. And, of course, thanks are also owed to those members of Congress who worked hard to achieve any increase for NSF in the face of enormous pressures to cut discretionary spending. In the coming weeks we’ll single out quite a few of those members, but right off the top it’s worth passing along our thanks to Rep. Frank Wolf (R-VA), Rep. Alan Mollohan (D-WV), Sen. Richard Shelby (R-AL), and Sen. Barbara Mikulski (D-MD) who are the Chairs and Ranking Members of the House and Senate appropriations subcommittees with jurisdiction over NSF.

Two Networking Pioneers to Receive Nation’s Highest Civilian Award


President Bush announced today that Bob Kahn and Vint Cerf will receive the Presidential Medal of Freedom — the Nation’s highest civil award — next Wednesday, November 9th. Kahn, a CRA Board member and member of my Government Affairs committee (I’m proud to say) and Cerf, the only two technologists on today’s list, will receive their awards for their work “design[ing] the software code that is used to transmit data over the Internet.”
“Dr. Cerf and Dr. Kahn have been at the forefront of a digital revolution that has transformed global commerce, communication, and entertainment.”
They join an amazing group of honorees for Wednesday’s event, including Muhammad Ali, Alan Greenspan, Aretha Franklin, Frank Robinson, Jack Nicklaus…wow.
Here’s the full text of the White House announcement:

Presidential Medal of Freedom Recipients
President George W. Bush today announced the recipients of the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the Nation’s highest civil award. Established by Executive Order 11085 in 1963, the Medal may be awarded by the President “to any person who has made an especially meritorious contribution to (1) the security or national interests of the United States, or (2) world peace, or (3) cultural or other significant public or private endeavors.” President Bush will honor these recipients at a White House ceremony on Wednesday, November 9, 2005.
Muhammad Ali is one of the greatest athletes of all time. He was the first three-time heavyweight boxing champion of the world, successfully defended the title 19 times, and was a Gold Medalist for the United States at the 1960 Olympic Games.
Carol Burnett is one of America’s most accomplished comediennes and actresses. She debuted on Broadway in 1959 and starred for more than a decade on The Carol Burnett Show. Ms. Burnett won a special place in the hearts of people across America through her combination of creativity, humor, and compassion.
Vinton Cerf and Robert Kahn designed the software code that is used to transmit data over the Internet. Dr. Cerf and Dr. Kahn have been at the forefront of a digital revolution that has transformed global commerce, communication, and entertainment.
Robert Conquest is a historian known for his groundbreaking work on Soviet history, politics, and foreign policy. More than 35 years after its publication, his landmark book, The Great Terror: Stalin’s Purge of the Thirties, remains one of the most influential studies of Soviet history and has been translated into more than 20 languages.
Aretha Franklin has brought joy to millions with her music. She has nearly two dozen number-one singles and has won numerous awards. Ms. Franklin was the first woman to be inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame.
Alan Greenspan has chaired the Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve for the last 18 years. Mr. Greenspan has been an extraordinary leader who has made great contributions to America’s economic growth and prosperity.
Andy Griffith is an American icon of the stage, cinema, and television. He first achieved national acclaim in the 1950s for his stand-up comedy routines, and he went on to star in television shows such as The Andy Griffith Show and Matlock, as well as numerous Broadway productions and films.
Paul Harvey is one of America’s most respected radio personalities and has set a standard of excellence for broadcasters. Since his radio broadcasts first aired nationally in 1951, Mr. Harvey has won the trust of millions of radio listeners.
Sonny Montgomery was a champion for veterans during his 30 years as a Member of the House of Representatives from Mississippi. His signature achievement was the Montgomery GI Bill, which has helped make education affordable for millions of veterans.
General Richard B. Myers served as Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff during one of the most challenging and dangerous periods in American history. General Myers was at the forefront of preparing America’s armed forces to meet the threats of the new century. His tenure was marked by the toppling of brutal dictatorships in Afghanistan and Iraq and the liberation of more than 50 million people.
Jack Nicklaus is the greatest professional golfer of all time. He won 18 majors as a professional, the first in 1962 and the last in 1986, and he won more than 70 PGA Tour events.
Frank Robinson is one of the greatest baseball players ever. Among his awards are National League Rookie of the Year, Most Valuable Player in both the American and National Leagues, and the American League Triple Crown in 1966. He also has been a top manager and earned Manager of the Year in the American League in 1989. He broke the color barrier for managers, becoming Major League Baseball’s first African-American manager in 1975.
Paul Rusesabagina demonstrated courage and compassion by sheltering people at the hotel he managed during the 1994 Rwandan genocide. By risking his own life, he helped to save the lives of more than 1,000 fellow Rwandans. Mr. Rusesabagina’s selfless acts have inspired millions, and he represents the best of the human spirit.
# # #

Congratulations, Bob and Vint!
Update: (November 12th) – CRA’s press release congratulating Bob and Vint appears after the jump.

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Sen. Clinton Raises Concerns About DARPA Computer Science


Sen. Hillary Clinton (D-NY) put the President’s nominee for Director of Defense Research and Engineering, John Young, on notice at his Senate confirmation hearing last week that she expects the new Director to address her concerns with DARPA (which DDR&E technically oversees), particularly DARPA support for university-led computer science research. Those concerns turns out to be ones shared by the computing research community, including “nonfiscal limitations such as the classification of work in areas that were previously unclassified; precluding university submissions as prime contractors on certain solicitations; [and] reducing the periods of performance to 18 to 24 months.”

This kind of short-term focus is not conducive to university programs to address broad fundamental technological and scientific challenges, especially when we know that research in computer science will be at the very core of network-centric warfare.
So I would hope, Mr. Young, that you would look into this and, assuming you are confirmed, that you would take this as a very serious charge, because we just had another study by the National Academy of Sciences that basically said the United States is losing its technological and scientific leadership, and that’s going to have long-term consequences certainly for defense but also for our standard of living and our economic prosperity.

Clinton rightly notes that these concerns are shared by not just the university researchers directly affected by these policies, but many of the industrial and multi-disciplinary users “downstream” who have come to depend on advances in information technology for their own progress. Additionally, the DOD’s own Defense Science Board, the National Academies, the President’s Information Technology Advisory Committee, and several Congressional committees have all raised concerns about the impact of DARPA’s move away from long-term, university-led research in information technology and its implications for the country’s long-term health and prosperity.
Unfortunately, as we’ve noted recently, at the same time these concerns about the state of computer science research at DARPA are being raised, one of the agency’s truly positive activities – its Cognitive Computing program – is imperiled by a sizeable cut approved in the Senate version of the FY 2006 Defense Appropriations bill (H.R. 2863). The Senate bill would cut $55 million from DARPA’s $114 million “Learning, Reasoning, and Integrated Cognitive Systems” account, a move that would hamper advancements in defense-related information technology in the short- and long-term and would also slow technological advancement essential to current and future military operations in Iraq and around the globe. We at CRA hope that Clinton will help urge her colleagues on the conference committee negotiating the bill to abandon the cut and provide the President’s requested funding level, the level approved in the House version of H.R. 2863.
I’ve included the whole of her statement — which is very good — after the jump. The importance of her remarks are multi-fold. One, she’s placed an important marker down for the computing research community — the concerns of the community will be on the new DDR&E’s plate as soon as he takes the job. Second, she’s raised the profile of the concerns among the rest of the members on the Senate Armed Services Committee and staff (though they’re already pretty sympathetic). And finally, it never hurts to have the current frontrunner for the Democratic nomination for President in 2008 using her five minutes at a confirmation hearing to talk about your concerns.
Anyway, read the whole thing after the jump — and if you get a chance, especially if you’re at a NY institution, drop Senator Clinton a note of thanks for looking out long-term research….

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2005 Internet Privacy Survey


NC State prof and former CRA Digital Government Fellow Annie Antón sends word that The Privacy Place is conducting its 2005 survey of online privacy policies and user values. The Privacy Place is an inter-disciplinary team of researchers at North Carolina State University’s Computer Science and Business Management departments as well as the Georgia Tech College of Computing, the Purdue University Computer Science Department and the University of Lugano Communication Sciences department — all committed to disseminating information and creating tools and techniques that help IT professionals and policy makers bring privacy policies and system requirements into better alignment.
They hope to get a few thousand respondents to their survey, so Annie’s asked for some help getting the word out. I just took the survey and it only took me a few minutes (and I’m pretty dense). Here’s Annie’s request with all the details:

ThePrivacyPlace.Org 2005 Privacy Survey is Underway!
Researchers at ThePrivacyPlace.Org are conducting an online survey about privacy policies and user values. The survey is supported by an NSF ITR grant (National Science Foundation Information Technology Research) and will help us establish with our investigations of privacy policy expression and user comprehension thereof.
The URL is: http://survey.theprivacyplace.org/
We need to attract several thousand respondents, and would be most appreciative if you would consider helping us get the word out about the survey which takes about 5 to 10 minutes to complete. The results will be made available in 2006 via our project website.
Prizes include
$50 Amazon.com gift certificates
and
IBM sponsored giveaways!

On behalf of the research staff at ThePrivacyPlace.Org, thank you!
Annie Antón

Governors Urge President to Support Fundamental Research


The governors of 27 states have sent a letter to President Bush urging him to “ensure that federal funding for university-based research remains a top national priority” in FY 2006 and beyond. In their letter, the 16 Democratic and 11 Republican governors make the case that basic research has been the fuel for innovation in their states — as well as a creator of high-wage jobs and an enabler of workforce productivity — and they credit the universities and labs performing the research with being “the training ground for our country’s next generation of highly-skilled workers.” They also cite the changing competitive environment that challenges current U.S. dominance in technology innovation:

Through economic globalization, competition in research and development has risen dramatically in the last few years. Asian and European countries have committed new resources to scientific and engineering research programs at nearly unprecedented rates. While the U.S. currently remains a global leader in science and technology, we must continue to be at the forefront of discovery and development. Only by investing in the research of today can we take full advantage of the innovations of tomorrow. Despite a period of scarce resources, basic science and engineering research is a vital national investment.

This is an important message for the President to hear, especially as the Administration is working now to put together his FY 2007 budget in time for its February release.
Unfortunately, the U.S. basic research enterprise is going to need all the help it can get. As we’ve noted before, it appears that pressures will be high on Congress to cut mandatory and discretionary spending (including federal science agencies) to offset the spiraling costs for hurricane relief and a possible tax cut. Yesterday, House Majority Leader Roy Blunt noted that Congress will be focusing on three pieces of budget legislation before they wrap up the current session this fall: a package carving savings from mandatory programs, an across-the-board cut in discretionary spending and a new hurricane relief package. Any across-the-board cut is likely to once again fall on agencies like the National Science Foundation, which suffered a similar 2 percent cut last year.
So any effort by an influential group like the 27 governors who signed this letter (and thanks to the Science Coalition for “working” this letter), is useful in the attempt to reverse what is becoming a very damaging trend of cutbacks in federal support for fundamental research.
Here’s the full letter (pdf, 1 mb). Did your governor sign?

HASC to Review DOD Cyber Security Efforts Tomorrow


With short notice, the House Armed Services Committee Panel on Asymmetric and Unconventional Threats will hold a hearing tomorrow to examine cyber security, information assurance and information exploitation issues at the Department of Defense. I say short notice because the witness list for the hearing didn’t appear until today and the hearing’s lead witness, CRA Board member and Purdue professor Eugene Spafford, didn’t receive an invitation to attend until Tuesday. Joining Spaf on the panel are David Grawrock, Principal Engineer and Security Architect at Intel, and Paul Kurtz, Executive Director of the Cyber Security Industry Alliance.
Spaf has already submitted his written testimony (pdf) and it’s excellent (especially given the time constraint). In it, he notes that DOD faces some worrisome trends in defending itself from cyber threats:

  • The number of reported attacks of various kinds is generally increasing annually;
  • Attacks are becoming more sophisticated and more efficient;
  • Few perpetrators are ever caught and prosecuted;
  • An unknown (but probably large) number of attacks, frauds and violations are not detected with current defenses;
  • A large number of detected attacks are not reported to appropriate authorities;
  • The problem is international in scope, both in origin of attacks and in location of victims;
  • The majority of the attacks are enabled by faulty software, poor configuration, and operator error.

Exacerbating these trends at DOD are a number of factors:

  • An over-dependence on commercial-off-the-shelf products (COTS);
  • A lack of metrics measuring the safety, security and quality of IT products in a general and meaningful way;
  • A lack of deterrence — vandals and criminals operate with the knowledge that there’s almost no chance of being caught unless they are exceedingly careless;
  • A lack of fallback alternatives — no planning for how to proceed with critical mission responsibilities with degraded or disabled IT resources;
  • An under-investment in research, especially long-term research at DOD and throughout the federal research portfolio; and
  • An ill-informed application of classification by agencies like DARPA that prevent some of the best minds in the country from working on cyber security problems.

Spaf has a number of recommendations of actions to take to reduce the threat to DOD IT systems, but I thought I’d list his primary recommendation here, especially as it echoes recommendations we’ve made many times in the past:

1. Most importantly, increase the priority and funding for scientific research into issues of security and protection of IT systems. This was the conclusion of the PITAC, and of numerous other studies cited in the PITAC report. Too much money is being spent on upgrading patches and not enough is being spent on fundamental research by qualified personnel. There are too few researchers in the country who understand the issues of information security, and too many of them are unable to find funding to support fundamental research. This is the case at our military research labs, commercial labs, and at our university research centers. Increased spending for research is an investment in national defense and national economic competitiveness, and is not in other expenditures for basic and applied research.

The hearing begins at 9 am, October 27th, and will be webcast (click on the microphone icon next to the hearing notice) and archived.
Spaf’s full testimony is here. (pdf)

Senate Approves Nearly 50 Percent Cut to DARPA IT R&D Account


As I noted in the last post, the Senate Appropriations Committee included language in the Senate verision of the FY 06 Defense Appropriations bill that would strip $55 million from an element of DARPA’s Cognitive Computing program — a move that seems to run counter to recent congressional sentiment on the role of computer science, especially university-led fundamental computer science, at DARPA. The “out of the blue” cut — there was no advance warning provided by appropriations staffers, no evidence that there was dissatisfaction with the program — would fall on the “Learning, Reasoning, and Integrated Cognitive Systems (pdf)” (COG-2) account. With little feedback from the Senate appropriators, we’re operating under the assumption that the main impetus for the cut was to provide an offset for increases elsewhere in the bill, though there’s been some speculation among Senate staff that the program may have suffered do to a misperception that it’s somehow similar to some of the agency’s more controversial bio-related programs.
It’s not. As we’ve tried to point out to the conferees who will have to determine whether the cut will stand in the compromise bill negotiated with the House (the House opted to fund the program at the agency’s requested level), research in learning, reasoning, and cognitive systems is focused on intelligent intrepretations of signals and data, on controlling unmanned vehicles, and on amplifying human effectiveness. Its aim is to reduce U.S. casualties by providing improved command and control and tactical planning against adversaries, as well as improved training systems. Work in this area includes research responsible for the Command Post of the Future (CPOF) — a software system currently deployed and very widely-used in Iraq to coordinate battle plans and integrate multiple intelligence reports, providing U.S. forces the capability to plan, execute and replan much faster than the enemy’s decision cycle and cited by Secretary Rumsfeld as the major contributor to victory in the first phase of Operation Iraqi Freedom. It’s also cricital to the research and development of autonomous, unmanned vehicles that amplify our warfighting capability while reducing the number of U.S. forces in harm’s way. Cutting support so significantly for this research will hamper advancements in defense-related IT in the short- and long-term and will slow technological advancements essential to current and future military operations in Iraq and around the globe.
It also runs completely counter to recent concerns of Congress, PITAC and the DOD’s Defense Science Board. All three bodies have raised strong concerns about the shift of DARPA resources away from fundamental research at universities, especially in information technology. The Cognitive Computing program is one area where DARPA has responded positively to these concerns.
Because these “out of the blue” cuts are so difficult to counter — they appear very late in the process with very little information about what motivated them and at a time when access to appropriations staff is most limited — we’ve focused our strategy opposing the cut by urging the members of the conference committee to abandon the Senate number and adopt the President’s budget request, the number approved by the House. You can help. We’ll tell you how soon….

Washington Post OpEd: Ready for High-Tech Progress?


Washington Post columnist Sebastian Mallaby has an interesting op-ed today inspired by news of Microsoft chairman Bill Gates’ tour of college campuses, urging students to consider majoring in computer science. The piece does a good job of making the case that Gates makes in his talks to students — computing is a field with a history of producing really great stuff that promises to make even more really great stuff in the future.

In most fields of human endeavor, you hope for gradual improvements: an engine that’s somewhat more efficient, a medicine that improves life expectancy by a few months. But computer power progresses exponentially, warping social life, intellectual horizons and the business playing field.

And Mallaby lays out some examples:

Smart watches will download weather forecasts and news headlines over wireless connections. Smart phones will scan products in department stores to check where better prices can be found. Notebook computers will be portable libraries with the weight of just one novel — libraries that allow you to scribble in the margins and share your witty insights wirelessly with friends. Your home computer will respond to instructions both written and vocal, and it won’t be a computer so much as a network. Music, videos, games, photographs — oh, yes, and all your lofty intellectual outpourings — will be beamed around the house to a variety of screens and speakers. The tablet on the kitchen counter will display recipes and shopping lists. The plasma screen on the wall will be for family photos.

…All great examples of some of the foreseeable future in computing. And Gates deserves enormous credit for taking on this role of cheerleader for the field. With the current trends facing the discipline, and a general trend of US students shying away from careers in math and the sciences, this effort is sorely needed.
The only additional thing I’d wish for in these kind of presentations, especially for prospective students, would be to add more sense of purpose to the call. We’ve had a very interesting discussion about this piece amongst the members of CRA’s Government Affairs Committee, including this great observation about what could be said about the “calling” of a career in science generally, and computer science in particular, from Peter Lee at CMU (who gave me permission to post it here):

Choosing to devote your life to science and technology is not a “normal” or “safe” choice. It is a choice made by people who are exceptionally smart, caring, and idealistic. Science makes people smarter and less scared, and it also makes the world better. Becoming a scientist means joining a community of idealists.

There’s not much of that in the talks that Gates is giving, but that’s understandable. It’s easy to lose sight of intellectual and ideological appeal when the practical applications are so plainly visible.
Anyway, a digression from the piece, but something that occurred to me and many of the other members of the committee.
The meat of Mallaby’s piece comes in the final three paragraphs though, where he’s right on the money:

A lot of Washington debates are about managing bad stuff: war, terrorism, natural disasters, killer viruses, budget deficits, trade deficits, medical inflation, airline bankruptcies, imploding corporate pension plans. But policy also needs to focus on the good stuff: To figure out how we can accelerate progress. If we don’t fix the budget deficit, we will be setting ourselves up for economic punishment. But if we don’t position ourselves to take advantage of technology, we will be setting ourselves up to miss a huge economic prize.
What must we do to remain prize-worthy? The good news is that, in Gates’s estimation, between 17 and 19 of the world’s top 20 computer science faculties are American, and Microsoft hasn’t yet moved many software jobs offshore. But to keep things that way we need to step up federal research funding and relax post-Sept. 11 visa rules, so that the United States remains what Gates calls “an IQ magnet.” And because smart Indians, Chinese and others are more likely to return home as their countries grow freer and more prosperous, the United States must focus on growing its own talent. Last year two respected global surveys of math skills in eighth and ninth grades put the United States in 15th and 24th place, respectively. That isn’t good enough.
It would take fairly little to address these problems. Last week a panel convened by the National Academies proposed a package of measures that ranged from math prizes for high schoolers to pay raises for math teachers, along with a program to boost federal research funding by 10 percent annually for seven years. The total price tag comes to $10 billion annually, but the nation spends nearly twice that amount on absurd farm subsidies. What kind of priorities are those?

Maybe Mallaby’s seen that argument somewhere else 🙂
The bad news is that the stars are aligning in such a way as to guarantee that there will be no increase for computer science, or the sciences generally, in the foreseeable future. The Republican Leadership is being pushed hard at the moment to find funds to “pay for” the large emergency supplements paid out for hurricane relief. Odds are those funds will come through across-the-board cuts to non-defense, non-security related discretionary spending. Look for science agencies to suffer cuts similar to last year’s across-the-board 2 percent reduction (or worse).
One particular computing program is under an even bigger threat. The Senate voted to approve a $55 million cut to DARPA’s cognitive computing program as part of the FY 06 Defense Appopriations bill. The out-of-the blue cut would hit DARPA’s $114 million “Learning, Reasoning, and Integrated Cognitive Systems” account, effectively cutting the program in half. The House did not call for a cut in its version of the bill, so CRA is working to urge members of the conference committee to abandon the Senate cut and embrace the House number. We’ll have all the details in the next post. I just thought it worthy of mention that at the same time the calls keep coming for increased support of computer science and the physical sciences, and as much progress as has been made to draw the linkage between federal investment in university research and our ability to continue to innovate, a significant percentage of our policy leadership still doesn’t get it.

New National Academies Report Warns Congress “Decisive Action Needed Now” to Preserve US Competitive Edge


This by now has been covered all over the place, but I’d be remiss not to add it here, too. The National Academies convened a 20-member panel last summer at the request of Sens. Lamar Alexander (R-TN) and Jeff Bingaman (D-NM), and Reps. Sherwood Boehlert (R-NY) and Bart Gordon (D-TN) to determine the “top 10 actions, in priority order, that federal policymakers could take to enhance the science and technology enterprise so the United States can successfully compete, prosper, and be secure in the global community of the twenty-first century.” The task was fast-tracked, and an august panel was put together, chaired by former Lockheed Martin CEO Norm Augustine and including folks like Intel Chairman Craig Barrett, President of Texas A&M Robert Gates, CEO of DuPont Charles Holliday, Jr., former Director of Defense Research and Engineering at DOD (and computer scientist) Anita Jones, and MIT president emeritus Chuck Vest. The committee met once, held focus groups on the five issue areas they decided merited attention (K-12 education, higher education, research, innovation and workforce issues, and national and homeland security), then put together the report they released on Wednesday, Rising Above the Gathering Storm: Energizing and Employing America for a Brighter Economic Future.
The committee actually came up with four major recommendations, supplemented with 20 specific actions to be taken. Hard to quibble with the broad recommendations:
Recommendation A: Increase America’s talent pool by vastly improving K-12 mathematics and science education.

  • Recruit ten thousand teachers, educate ten million minds — a program that would award competitive 4-year scholarships for students to obtain bachelor’s degrees in the physical or life sciences, engineering or mathematics with concurrent certification as K-12 math and science teachers.
  • Strengthen two hundred fifty thousand teachers’ skills, inspire students every day — provide summer institutes, science and mathematics master’s programs, advanced placement training, and a curriculum modeled on world-class standards for current K-12 teachers.
  • Enlarge the pipeline by creating opportunities and incentives for middle-school and high-school students to pursue advanced work in science and math.

Recommendation B: Sustain and strengthen the nation’s traditional commitment to the long-term basic research that has the potential to be transformational to maintain the flow of new ideas that fuel the economy, provide security, and enhance the quality of life.

  • Increase the federal investment in long-term basic research by 10 percent annually over the next 7 years, with special attention paid to the physical sciences, engineering, mathematics, and information sciences and to DOD basic-research funding.
  • Provide new research grants of $500,000 each annually, payable over 5 years, to 2000 of our most outstanding early career researchers.
  • Institute a National Coordination Office for Research Infrastructure to manage a centralized research-infrastructure fund of $500 million per year over the next 5 years.
  • Allocate at least 8 percent of the budgets of federal research agencies to high-risk, high payoff research.
  • Create in DOE an organziation like DARPA [hopefully in the model of “old” DARPA – ed] called ARPA-E which would be charged with R&D to meet the nation’s long-term energy challenges.
  • Institute a Presidential Innovation Award to stimulate scientific and engineering advances in the national interest.

Recommendation C: Make the US the most attractive setting in which to study, perform research, and commercialize technologic innovation so that we can develop, recruit, and retain the best and brightest students, scientists and engineers from within the US and throughout the world.

  • Provide 25,000 new 4-year undergraduate scholarships each year to US citizens attending US institutions.
  • Increase the number of US citizens pursuing graduate study “in areas of national need” by funding 5,000 new graduate fellowships each year.
  • Provide a federal tax credit to encourage employers to make continuing education available to practicing scientists and engineers.
  • Continue to improve visa processing for international students.
  • Provide a 1-year automatic visa extension to international students who receive doctorates or equivalent in STEM or other areas of national need at US institutions to remain in the US to seek employment.
  • Institute a new skills-based, preferential immigration option.
  • Reform the current system of “deemed exports”.

Recommendation D: Ensure that the US is the premier place in the world to innovate, invest in downstream activities, and create high-paying jobs that are based on innovation by modernizing the patent system, realigning tax policies to encourage innovation, and ensuring affordable broadband access.

  • “Enhance” intellectual-property protection for the 21st century global economy.
  • Enact a stronger R&D tax credit to encourage private investment in innovation.
  • Provide tax incentives for US-based innovation.
  • Ensure ubiquitous broadband Internet access.

Hard to find fault in much of that — though I’m leeriest of the IP-related “enhancements” (see the report for the details about each of the action items listed). The committee came up with a “back of the envelope” calculation of about $10 billion annually to fully implement the recommendations (the R&D tax credit recommendation is actually the costliest). While that number might seem impossibly high to achieve under the current political mindset for science funding — after all, NSF suffered a 2 percent cut in the last budget and the smart money is betting something similar for FY 06 when appropriations finally wrap up — in the grand scheme of things, $10 billion on top of an $840 billion discretionary budget is a relatively small investment for the potential benefit. If the President is looking for an initiative that would enhance his legacy, I think he’d be hard-pressed to find one with a better cost/benefit ratio.
Anyway, as I said, the report has gathered a reasonable amount of attention in the press. The New York Times has coverage, as does the Chronicle of Higher Education (subscription required). There are a couple of follow-up hearings planned, including one by the Senate Committee on Energy and Natural Resources on October 18th, and the House Science Committee on October 20th.
We’ll try and have all the details here.
(Thanks to Sam Liles and Spaf for the pointers!)

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