Since there’s been so much recent coverage of computing R&D issues in the popular press, and since we’ve been trying to cite so much of it here, I figured I’d make life easy on myself and anyone else looking for a collection of recent articles by creating a new “R&D in the Press” category over there on the left. Clicking the link gets you to an archive of all the posts we’ve made citing news reports — though at the moment it only goes back a couple of weeks. When I get some time, I’ll go deeper into the archive and tag more relevant posts with the new category.
Enjoy!
This OpEd (free link) by Norman Ornstein, a fellow at the American Enterprise Institute (a reasonably influential conservative think tank — Newt Gingrich is also a fellow), ran today in Roll Call (sub req’d), “the Newspaper of Capitol Hill.” It’s a strong defense of federal support of basic research that cites DARPA’s declining support for university computer science research as one of the flawed policy decisions that need correcting to preserve our future competitiveness. Here’s a snippet:
But I am growing increasingly alarmed, less because of the dynamism in Asia and more because of our blindness and obtuseness when it comes to our crown jewel: our overwhelming lead in basic research and our position as home to the best scientists in the world.
Basic research is the real building block of economic growth, and here we have had the franchise; just look at the number of Nobel Prize winners from the United States compared to the rest of the world combined. Our academic institutions and research labs have been magnets attracting, and often keeping, the best and the brightest. Our academic openness and our culture of freedom have encouraged good research and challenges to orthodoxy. Our politicians have recognized that most basic research has to be funded by the government because there is scant short-term economic benefit for most businesses to do it themselves.
But now, in a variety of ways, we are frittering away this asset, and for no good reason. Start with the federal budget. Basic research has been concentrated in a few key institutions: the National Institutes of Health, the National Science Foundation, the National Institute of Standards and Technology, and the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency at the Pentagon. After a series of pledges to double the NIH budget and then keep it on a growth path, NIH has stagnated. Budget growth for next year is one-half of 1 percent, which will be below inflation for the first time since the 1980s, at a time when the need for more biomedical research is obvious.
The NSF budget is slated to grow by 2 percent, leaving it $3 billion below the funding level Congress promised in 2002. At NIST, the Bush administration is trying to eliminate the Advanced Technology Program and to slash the Manufacturing Extension Partnership by 57 percent. At DARPA, which originated the Internet but where computer science research has been flat for several years, the money going to university researchers has fallen precipitously, along with a larger focus on applied research for the here and now.
…
It is gut check time. The foolish fiscal policies that keep big entitlements off the table, wont consider revenues along with spending, and have turned the one-sixth of the budget that is discretionary into a vicious, zero-sum game, are truly eating our seed corn in this critical area. Somebody needs to get the White House to wake up, and Congress to understand what it is mindlessly doing.
But what happens if the United States not only gives up every trade protection benefit, continues to suffer a loss of manufacturing and fritters away its research leadership in science, medicine and technology?
That’s a lose-lose proposition. And it ought to worry U.S. leaders a lot more than it has so far.
Of all the government sources of funding for basic technology research, few have delivered more breakthroughs for Silicon Valley and the U.S. economy than the Pentagon’s Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, or DARPA.
That’s why a shift away from basic and university research in DARPA funding is alarming for the valley and for the future of innovation in the United States. Long-term casualties could eventually include America’s competitiveness and military readiness.
…
The shift at DARPA is all the more troubling as it goes hand in hand with decreases in funding for basic research across the Pentagon and at the National Science Foundation. What’s more, these subtle yet significant changes have occurred without a national debate.
The time to have that debate is now. If these trends continue, America will pay dearly for them.
Fortunately, it appears that Congress is getting interested in having that debate. In early May the House Science Committee will hold a hearing on the issue. Testifying before the committee will be John Marburger, Director of the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy; Tony Tether, Director of DARPA; Bill Wulf, President of the National Academy of Engineering; and Tom Leighton, Co-Founder and Chief Scientist at Akamai Industries, and Chair of the PITAC Subcommittee on Cyber Security, which just released it’s review of the federal government’s cyber security R&D programs. We, of course, will bring you all the details.
In the meantime, read the full editorial.
Since Sue, Ed, Andy, and a whole host of my relatives have all sent me a pointer to this OpEd by Thomas Friedman in the NY Times, you may have already seen it. But that doesn’t make it any less worth noting.
Friedman picks up where former Clinton defense officials Perry and Deutch left off earlier in the week (which we covered here), who picked up where NY Times reporter John Markoff left off a couple weeks earlier (which we covered here), arguing that the Bush Administration, by cutting the U.S. investment in fundamental research, has put not only our national security at risk (as noted by Perry and Deutch), but our economic security at risk as well.
The Bush team is proposing cutting the Pentagon’s budget for basic science and technology research by 20 percent next year – after President Bush and the Republican Congress already slashed the 2005 budget of the National Science Foundation by $100 million.
When the National Innovation Initiative, a bipartisan study by the country’s leading technologists and industrialists about how to re-energize U.S. competitiveness, was unveiled last December, it was virtually ignored by the White House. Did you hear about it? Probably not, because the president preferred to focus all attention on privatizing Social Security.
It’s as if we have an industrial-age presidency, catering to a pre-industrial ideological base, in a post-industrial era.
Of course, when Friedman writes regarding the National Innovation Initiative
Did you hear about it? Probably not…
he’s obviously not referring to readers of this blog, who read all about the Council on Competitiveness report back on December 15th. 🙂
Friedman has hit the Administration and Congress hard (and repeatedly) for allowing NSF to be cut in the FY 2005 appropriations, so I’m glad to see him continue to bang the drum for federal support for fundamental research.
So, read the whole thing, and thanks to Sue, Ed, Andy and my relations for pointing it out.
The New York Times has an interesting OpEd today from former secretary of defense William Perry and his former undersecretary John Deutch on the lack of support for basic research, applied research and advanced technology development (collectively, “Defense Science and Technology”) at the Department of Defense.
Of the Pentagon’s $419.3 billion budget request for next year, only about $10.5 billion – 2 percent – will go toward basic research, applied research and advanced technology development. This represents a 20 percent reduction from last year, a drastic cutback that threatens the long-term security of the nation. Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld should reconsider this request, and if he does not, Congress should restore the cut.
These research and development activities, known as the “technology base” program, are a vital part of the United States defense program. For good reason: the tech base is America’s investment in the future. Over the years, tech base activities have yielded advances in scientific and engineering knowledge that have given United States forces the technological superiority that is responsible in large measure for their current dominance in conventional military power.
While it’s not earth-shattering that members of the previous administration might question the priorities of the current administration, the OpEd adds to the chorusofvoices expressing concern about DOD R&D trends.
Worth reading the whole thing.
And watch this space for news of yet another influential voice raising concerns….
There hasn’t been much discussion of this bill around town, but today Reps. Frank Wolf (R-VA), Chair of the Science, Justice, Commerce, State House Appropriations Subcommittee, and Vern Ehlers (R-MI), Chair of the Environment, Technology and Standards House Science Subcommittee, will introduce a bill aimed at increasing the number of students in math, science or engineering by forgiving interest on undergraduate student loans for students in those majors who agree to work five years in their fields upon graduate. From the release:
While the need for science and engineering positions in the United States has grown five times the rate of the civilian workforce as a whole since 1980, U.S. colleges and universities have experienced a steady decline in the number of American students earning science and engineering degrees. In 2000, Asian universities accounted for almost 1.2 million of the world’s science and engineering degrees, European universities (including Russia and eastern Europe) accounted for 850,000 and North American universities accounted for only about 500,000, according to the most recent statistics available to the National Science Foundation.
America’s advantage in science is slipping. This bill is aimed at reversing that trend by attracting and retaining more math, science and engineering undergraduate students.
The press conference (at 1 pm today, outside the Capitol) will bring together Former House Speaker Newt Gingrinch, who wrote about this idea in his recent book, the two congressmen, and Alan Merten, President of George Mason University.
Apparently Wolf was motivated in part by trends he saw presented in a Task Force of the Future of American Innovation report called Benchmarking our Innovation Future (pdf). (CRA is a member of the Task Force.) We’ve covered the report, most recently here.
The benchmarks indicate that the U.S. is in danger of losing its leadership role in science and innovation, a position it has held with a firm grip since the end of World War II.
We’ll have more coverage on this as it moves forward, but in the meantime, here’s a copy of the draft version of the bill (pdf) (for those who like to pick through legislative language).
Washington Post science and technology writer Rick Weiss riffs off of the recent news that NASA plans to pull the plug on the Voyager missions to demonstrate that the U.S. support for research has become too mundane — too evolutionary rather than revolutionary, too focused on short-term gains versus long-term results. The two Voyager probes, three decades after being launched on their tour of the outer planets, are now tickling the edge of interstellar space and still sending back data. NASA’s FY 2006 budget request eliminates funding for the Voyager program and a suite of other space probes (total cost savings = $23 million in FY 06) as part of the agency’s effort to refocus on the President’s Moon/Mars initiative — an initiative that has led to significant cuts elsewhere in the agency as well. Unfortunately, the problems aren’t just limited to NASA:
It would be less disheartening if the move to kill the Voyager program were an isolated example. But the U.S. scientific enterprise is riddled with evidence that Americans have lost sight of the value of non-applied, curiosity-driven research — the open-ended sort of exploration that doesn’t know exactly where it’s going but so often leads to big payoffs. In discipline after discipline, the demand for specific products, profits or outcomes — “deliverables,” in the parlance of government — has become the dominant force driving research agendas. Instead of being exploratory and expansive, science — especially in the wake of 9/11 — seems increasingly delimited and defensive.
Take, for example, the Pentagon’s Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency — arguably the nation’s premier funder of unencumbered scientific exploration, whose early dabbling in computer network design gave rise to the Internet. Agency officials recently acknowledged to Congress that they were shifting their focus away from blue-sky research and toward goal-oriented and increasingly classified endeavors.
Similarly, in geology, scientists have for years sought funds to blanket the nation with thousands of sensors to create an enormous, networked listening device that might teach us something about how the earth is shifting beneath our feet. The system got so far as to be authorized by Congress for $170 million over five years, but only $16 million has been appropriated in the first three of those years and just 62 of an anticipated 7,000 sensors have been deployed. Only in fiscal 2006, thanks to the South Asian tsunami, is the program poised to get more fully funded — out of a narrow desire to better predict the effects of such disasters here.
The Department of Energy in February announced it is killing the so-called BTeV project at Fermilab in Batavia, Ill., one of the last labs in this country still supporting studies in high-energy physics. This field, once dominated by the United States, promises to discover in the next decade some of the most basic subatomic particles in the universe, including the first so-called supersymmetric particle — a kind of stuff that seems to account for the vast majority of matter in the universe but which scientists have so far been unable to put their fingers on.
“We seem to have reached a point where people are so overwhelmed by the problems we face, we’re not sure we really need more frontiers,” said Kei Koizumi of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, noting that the only segments of the nation’s research and development budget enjoying real growth are defense and homeland security.
We’ve covered the DARPA story and its impact on computer science research pretty extensively (latest here).
Anyway, it’s a good piece — it even starts with a Star Trek quote. Read it all here.
As the appropriations season gets underway in earnest, Representatives Vern Ehlers (R-MI) and Rush Holt (D-NJ) have once again begun their push to secure more funding for the National Science Foundation by asking fellow members of the House to urge the Chair and Ranking Member of the House Appropriations Subcommittee on Science, State, Justice and Commerce to fund NSF at $6.1 billion in FY 2006 — an increase of $627 million over FY 2005 (11 percent). Ehlers and Holt have circulated a Dear Colleague (pdf) letter to the members of the House, laying out a concise case for NSF:
Advances in science and technology underpin our ability to meet many of the challenges that America faces today, including securing the homeland, preventing terrorism, fostering innovation and economic development, and educating our children to be able to compete in the knowledge-based, global economy. As a nation we must continue to invest in our scientific enterprise.
Supporting the National Science Foundation (NSF) is key to maintaining our preeminence in science and technology. NSF investments are aimed at the frontiers of science and engineering, where advances in fundamental knowledge drive innovation, progress, and productivity. NSF supports the education of scientists and engineers as well as the workforce of tommorrow — a workforce in which all workers, from office assistants to rocket scientists, will require basic math and science skills.
The Dear Colleague then asks the member to sign a letter (pdf) that will be delivered to Appropriations Subcommittee Chair Frank Wolf (R-VA) and Ranking Member Alan Mollohan (D-WV). That letter makes a more detailed case for NSF (it’s worth reading (pdf)).
Last year, Ehlers and Holt, with the help of the scientific community, were able to convince 157 of their colleagues (but only 41 Republicans) to sign a similar letter, which was a good symbolic result, but didn’t mitigate the 2 percent cut the agency suffered as a result of the FY 05 appropriations process. The hope this year is to encourage more members to sign on and greatly increase the number of Republicans…
…Which makes this a good time to consider — if you haven’t already — joining CRA’s Computing Research Advocacy Network (CRAN), our electronic mailing list that delivers timely information about key advocacy opportunities. CRA will once again be involved in this effort, and the CRAN will likely play a significant role. All the details to join are here! Update: (4:45 pm, 4/8/05) Corrected the count of GOP signers.
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Reaction to Trends in CS Majors article
/In: CRA, Misc., People /by Peter HarshaFirst, there was Jay Vegso’s Computing Research News article: “Interest in CS as a Major Drops Among Incoming Freshmen”
Then his blog post.
Then C-Net picked it up.
Then Techdirt.
Now it’s hit Slashdot and the comments are pouring in.
Housekeeping Note: New Blog Category
/In: Misc. /by Peter HarshaSince there’s been so much recent coverage of computing R&D issues in the popular press, and since we’ve been trying to cite so much of it here, I figured I’d make life easy on myself and anyone else looking for a collection of recent articles by creating a new “R&D in the Press” category over there on the left. Clicking the link gets you to an archive of all the posts we’ve made citing news reports — though at the moment it only goes back a couple of weeks. When I get some time, I’ll go deeper into the archive and tag more relevant posts with the new category.
Enjoy!
Ball Keeps Rolling: Ornstein Writes in Support of Basic Research and IT R&D at DARPA
/In: Funding, R&D in the Press /by Peter HarshaThis OpEd (free link) by Norman Ornstein, a fellow at the American Enterprise Institute (a reasonably influential conservative think tank — Newt Gingrich is also a fellow), ran today in Roll Call (sub req’d), “the Newspaper of Capitol Hill.” It’s a strong defense of federal support of basic research that cites DARPA’s declining support for university computer science research as one of the flawed policy decisions that need correcting to preserve our future competitiveness. Here’s a snippet:
And with that, the (bipartisan) chorus of voices grows….
Seattle Post-Intelligencer Worries About Cuts to Federal R&D
/In: Funding, R&D in the Press /by Peter HarshaThe Seattle PI makes the economic case for federal support of R&D in an editorial today.
Read it all.
The Drumbeat Continues: SJ Merc News on DARPA IT R&D and Universities
/In: Funding, Policy, R&D in the Press /by Peter HarshaFollowing in the wake of news stories and OpEds in the New York Times, the San Jose Mercury News editorializes today on the negative impact of DARPA’s shift away from university researchers in computer science and engineering.
Fortunately, it appears that Congress is getting interested in having that debate. In early May the House Science Committee will hold a hearing on the issue. Testifying before the committee will be John Marburger, Director of the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy; Tony Tether, Director of DARPA; Bill Wulf, President of the National Academy of Engineering; and Tom Leighton, Co-Founder and Chief Scientist at Akamai Industries, and Chair of the PITAC Subcommittee on Cyber Security, which just released it’s review of the federal government’s cyber security R&D programs. We, of course, will bring you all the details.
In the meantime, read the full editorial.
NY Times’ Friedman OpEd on Bush Failure to Support Innovation, U.S. Competitiveness
/In: Funding, Policy, R&D in the Press /by Peter HarshaSince Sue, Ed, Andy, and a whole host of my relatives have all sent me a pointer to this OpEd by Thomas Friedman in the NY Times, you may have already seen it. But that doesn’t make it any less worth noting.
Friedman picks up where former Clinton defense officials Perry and Deutch left off earlier in the week (which we covered here), who picked up where NY Times reporter John Markoff left off a couple weeks earlier (which we covered here), arguing that the Bush Administration, by cutting the U.S. investment in fundamental research, has put not only our national security at risk (as noted by Perry and Deutch), but our economic security at risk as well.
Of course, when Friedman writes regarding the National Innovation Initiative
he’s obviously not referring to readers of this blog, who read all about the Council on Competitiveness report back on December 15th. 🙂
Friedman has hit the Administration and Congress hard (and repeatedly) for allowing NSF to be cut in the FY 2005 appropriations, so I’m glad to see him continue to bang the drum for federal support for fundamental research.
So, read the whole thing, and thanks to Sue, Ed, Andy and my relations for pointing it out.
Former Clinton DOD Officials Note Lack of DOD S&T Support
/In: Funding, Policy, R&D in the Press /by Peter HarshaThe New York Times has an interesting OpEd today from former secretary of defense William Perry and his former undersecretary John Deutch on the lack of support for basic research, applied research and advanced technology development (collectively, “Defense Science and Technology”) at the Department of Defense.
While it’s not earth-shattering that members of the previous administration might question the priorities of the current administration, the OpEd adds to the chorus of voices expressing concern about DOD R&D trends.
Worth reading the whole thing.
And watch this space for news of yet another influential voice raising concerns….
Wolf/Ehlers To Introduce Bill to Assist Math, Science and Engineering Majors
/In: Funding /by Peter HarshaThere hasn’t been much discussion of this bill around town, but today Reps. Frank Wolf (R-VA), Chair of the Science, Justice, Commerce, State House Appropriations Subcommittee, and Vern Ehlers (R-MI), Chair of the Environment, Technology and Standards House Science Subcommittee, will introduce a bill aimed at increasing the number of students in math, science or engineering by forgiving interest on undergraduate student loans for students in those majors who agree to work five years in their fields upon graduate. From the release:
The press conference (at 1 pm today, outside the Capitol) will bring together Former House Speaker Newt Gingrinch, who wrote about this idea in his recent book, the two congressmen, and Alan Merten, President of George Mason University.
Apparently Wolf was motivated in part by trends he saw presented in a Task Force of the Future of American Innovation report called Benchmarking our Innovation Future (pdf). (CRA is a member of the Task Force.) We’ve covered the report, most recently here.
The benchmarks indicate that the U.S. is in danger of losing its leadership role in science and innovation, a position it has held with a firm grip since the end of World War II.
We’ll have more coverage on this as it moves forward, but in the meantime, here’s a copy of the draft version of the bill (pdf) (for those who like to pick through legislative language).
Washington Post OpEd: “Our Incredible Shrinking Curiosity”
/In: Funding, Policy, R&D in the Press /by Peter HarshaWashington Post science and technology writer Rick Weiss riffs off of the recent news that NASA plans to pull the plug on the Voyager missions to demonstrate that the U.S. support for research has become too mundane — too evolutionary rather than revolutionary, too focused on short-term gains versus long-term results. The two Voyager probes, three decades after being launched on their tour of the outer planets, are now tickling the edge of interstellar space and still sending back data. NASA’s FY 2006 budget request eliminates funding for the Voyager program and a suite of other space probes (total cost savings = $23 million in FY 06) as part of the agency’s effort to refocus on the President’s Moon/Mars initiative — an initiative that has led to significant cuts elsewhere in the agency as well. Unfortunately, the problems aren’t just limited to NASA:
We’ve covered the DARPA story and its impact on computer science research pretty extensively (latest here).
Anyway, it’s a good piece — it even starts with a Star Trek quote. Read it all here.
Reps. Ehlers and Holt Circulate Letter Urging Increased NSF Funding
/In: Funding /by Peter HarshaAs the appropriations season gets underway in earnest, Representatives Vern Ehlers (R-MI) and Rush Holt (D-NJ) have once again begun their push to secure more funding for the National Science Foundation by asking fellow members of the House to urge the Chair and Ranking Member of the House Appropriations Subcommittee on Science, State, Justice and Commerce to fund NSF at $6.1 billion in FY 2006 — an increase of $627 million over FY 2005 (11 percent). Ehlers and Holt have circulated a Dear Colleague (pdf) letter to the members of the House, laying out a concise case for NSF:
The Dear Colleague then asks the member to sign a letter (pdf) that will be delivered to Appropriations Subcommittee Chair Frank Wolf (R-VA) and Ranking Member Alan Mollohan (D-WV). That letter makes a more detailed case for NSF (it’s worth reading (pdf)).
Last year, Ehlers and Holt, with the help of the scientific community, were able to convince 157 of their colleagues (but only 41 Republicans) to sign a similar letter, which was a good symbolic result, but didn’t mitigate the 2 percent cut the agency suffered as a result of the FY 05 appropriations process. The hope this year is to encourage more members to sign on and greatly increase the number of Republicans…
…Which makes this a good time to consider — if you haven’t already — joining CRA’s Computing Research Advocacy Network (CRAN), our electronic mailing list that delivers timely information about key advocacy opportunities. CRA will once again be involved in this effort, and the CRAN will likely play a significant role. All the details to join are here!
Update: (4:45 pm, 4/8/05) Corrected the count of GOP signers.