Thomas Friedman’s editorial in the New York Times today hits Congress hard for approving a cut to the National Science Foundation in the Omnibus Appropriations bill. A sample:
Of all the irresponsible aspects of the 2005 budget bill that the Republican-led Congress just passed, nothing could be more irresponsible than the fact that funding for the National Science Foundation was cut by nearly 2 percent, or $105 million.
Think about this. We are facing a mounting crisis in science and engineering education. The generation of scientists, engineers and mathematicians who were spurred to get advanced degrees by the 1957 Soviet launch of Sputnik and the challenge by President John Kennedy to put a man on the moon is slowly retiring.
But because of the steady erosion of science, math and engineering education in U.S. high schools, our cold war generation of American scientists is not being fully replenished. We traditionally filled the gap with Indian, Chinese and other immigrant brainpower. But post-9/11, many of these foreign engineers are not coming here anymore, and, because the world is now flat and wired, many others can stay home and innovate without having to emigrate.
If we don’t do something soon and dramatic to reverse this “erosion,” Shirley Ann Jackson, the president of Rensselaer Polytechnic and president of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, told me, we are not going to have the scientific foundation to sustain our high standard of living in 15 or 20 years.
Instead of doubling the N.S.F. budget – to support more science education and research at every level – this Congress decided to cut it! Could anything be more idiotic?
Read the whole thing here. Update: The San Jose Mercury Newsagrees.
This article I spotted today in Government Computer News on former Director of DHS’ National Cybersecurity Division Amit Yoran’s thoughts about DHS’ niche in federal cybersecurity efforts reminded me that I hadn’t provided an update on what I thought was a very interesting meeting of PITAC’s Subcommittee on Cybersecurity R&D a week ago last Friday.
The Subcommittee is in the process of evaluating the federal government’s efforts in supporting cybersecurity research and development — trying to figure out how well the government is targeting the right research areas, whether there’s good balance between short-term and long-term research, whether we’re doing all we can to improve technology transfer, and whether we’re well prepared for the security challenges of the future. The goal is to produce a final report the full PITAC can approve at its March 2005 meeting. So far the subcommittee has produced a first draft, which is what was presented by Subcommittee Chair F. Thomson Leighton at the Nov 19th meeting.
And that first draft is very good. It’s clear the committee has taken to heart much of the testimony it has received, including testimony CRA submitted to the committee last July. Leighton’s slide presentation (pdf) does a good job of laying out the details, but I thought I’d summarize them a bit here.
The committee has identified four main issues: 1) Problems with civilian cyber security research; 2) Problems with the size of the cyber security basic research community; 3) Tech transfer issues; and 4) The coordination of cyber security R&D. They seem to have devoted quite a bit of attention to the first issue, and the points that they raise are all right on the money (and concerns CRA shares), namely:
The Federal R&D budget provides severely insufficient funding for basic research in cyber security. Even better, the subcommittee specifies an actual dollar amount increase (at least $90 million per year) necessary to make up for the current under-investment (while leaving the door open for future increases in funding beyond $90 million per year should “the Nation’s security posture in the future” warrant it).
The subcommittee finds that the current federal focus on near-term applications in cyber security must be reversed.
Federal research efforts need to avoid “incrementalism.” Research programs need to accommodate longer time periods and accept some “failures.”
We must buttress civilian cyber security R&D efforts. While there’s clearly a need for the Defense Department and the intelligence agencies to sponsor significant amounts of cyber security R&D related to their missions, increasingly, much of that research is being classified. There are costs to bear when research is classified. For example, research results for classified research are very slow to disseminate, if ever, and many/most university researchers are unable to participate — meaning some of the best minds in the country aren’t working on these important problems. As a result, NSF, the primary funder of unclassified, civilian cyber security R&D, is heavily oversubscribed. Its cyber security research program (CyberTrust) has an astonishingly bad award rate of 5-8 percent. The subcommittee estimates that a quadrupling (emph. added) of the CyberTrust budget could be productively used by the civilian cyber security community.
There are no shortage of research areas in need of funding: Computer authentication methodologies; securing fundamental protocols, secure software engineering, end-to-end system security, monitoring and detection; mitigation and recovery methodologies’ cyberforensics and technology to enable prosecution of criminals; modeling and testbeds for new technologies; metrics, benchmarks and best practices; and societal and governance issues. In short, the subcommittee says
There is no silver bullet or small set of silver bullets. It is not a matter of “tweaking” in the Internet — there is no foundation of security to tweak. The existing Internet was built based on assumption of trust: it was assumed no one would harm the infrastructure, even by accident.
I think this is all excellent, and basically in agreement with the testimony CRA provided back in July. About the only thing of which I would have liked to have seen discussion is the issue of the potential (and real) chilling effect on research of laws aimed at protecting intellectual property and privacy — most notably the impediment to research posed by provisions of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act. As we noted in our testimony (by stealing excellent language from our affiliate ACM’s U.S. Public Policy Office):
[T]he anti-circumvention provisions of the DMCA interfere with many legal, non-infringing uses of digital computing and prevent scientists and technologists from circumventing access technologies to recognize shortcomings in security systems, to defend patents and copyrights, to discover and fix dangerous bugs in code, to analyze and stop malicious code (e.g., viruses), and to conduct forms of desired educational activities. In some instances, the threat of legal action under the DMCA has deterred scientists from publishing scholarly work or even publicly discussing their research, both fundamental tenets of scientific discourse.
Other than that, I’m pretty happy with what I’ve seen from the report so far. (Please read through the slides to get the details on the other three issues the subcommittee identified.) If the final report contains the important discussion of the character of research supported by each of the federal agencies funding cyber security efforts and the subcommittee’s funding recommendations, it will be a strong document that should prove very useful in the computing research community’s efforts to reshape cyber security R&D policy at federal agencies (see in particular the subcommittee’s discussions about the nature and amount of research sponsored by DHS — too short-term and too little, in sum).
We’ll continue to keep an eye on the committee’s progress….
Oh, and just to get back to the article that triggered this post in the first place, I think it’s important to note that though this:
Yoran also called for more government support for basic security research. He said the initial $18 million budgeted for cybersecurity R&D in the first year of DHS was adequate as the department identified needs. But going forward, personally, I would like to see greater government support for fundamental security research, he said.
implies that DHS is spending $18 million on basic research in cyber security, this isn’t actually the case (as the subcommittee points out on slide 25). The agency currently spends just $1.5 million on research that can truly be considered basic, long-term research. The remaining $16.5 million is spent on short-term activities.
Still, it’s encouraging that Yoran at least acknowledges that the agency is lacking in its support for fundamental research. Hopefully his replacement will as well — and do something about it.
Kudos to the New York Times for noting the disconnect between Congress earmarking funds for questionable projects and, at the same time, cutting funding for the agency responsible for fueling much of the innovation that has driven our economy and improved our health and welfare.
From the article:
While cutting the budget of the [National] [S]cience [F]oundation, Congress found money for the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, the Alabama Sports Hall of Fame in Birmingham, the Country Music Hall of Fame in Nashville, bathhouses in Hot Springs, Ark., and hundreds of similar projects.
The science foundation helped finance research that led to Web browsers, like Internet Explorer and Netscape, and to search engines like Google. Its research has produced advances in fields from astronomy to zoology, including weather forecasting, nanotechnology, highway safety and climate change.
And the Times is right to contrast the increases with the cuts. With budget caps as tight as they are — discretionary spending increasing just 4 percent, with that increase in a select few agencies (DOD and NASA, most notably in R&D) — appropriations are truly a zero-sum game. Funding for new earmarks must come out of existing funding. In FY 2004, earmarks accounted for nearly $2 billion of the federal R&D budget. In FY 2005, it’s likely to be even higher (though I don’t yet have the numbers).
In any case, I’m pleased to see that the mainstream press is beginning to bang the drum about the dangers of underfunding fundamental research. Maybe it’ll have some positive effect on the FY 2006 budget process…(which has already begun!).
Here’s the full article.
Also here’s recentcoverageoftheNSFcuts.
Thanks to Moshe Vardi for the head’s up about this Op-Ed from Joseph S. Nye in today’s New York Times concerning the decline in foreign student enrollment in American universities, due in large part to the nightmare that is the current U.S. visa process. It jives well with the Fareed Zakaria piece I linked to yesterday. Here’s a key bit:
In an effort to exclude a dangerous few, we are keeping out the helpful many. Consular officials know that they face career-threatening punishment if they are too lax, but face little sanction if they are too strict. Add to those perverse incentives, the need to coordinate with the extensive bureaucracy of the Department of Homeland Security, and you have a perfect recipe for inertia. More resources can help speed the process, but little will happen until Congress and the Bush administration make the problem a higher priority.
Stumbled upon this interesting article from the UK’s Guardian detailing the recognition growing in the EU about the need for an agency similar to the US’ National Science Foundation as a way to help the union “radically improve its knowledge economy.” The article describes a European commission report earlier this month that noted U.S. R&D funding, currently at about $395 billion (£210 billion) total (that’s industry and federal), has been a key reason for continued US dominance in innovation and hi-tech industries.
As things stand, the 25 member states of the EU spend about £120bn a year investing in research and development. While that sounds like a lot, it pales beside the more than £210bn spent by the United States. This imbalance is one of the factors that have created a “brain drain” of scientific talent from Europe to the US, identified recently by the Royal Society as “particularly noticeable” in the standing of top-quality research teams. Generous research grants, better salaries and conditions in both the private sector and universities have sucked the best and brightest – and not just in science – across the Atlantic and put them to work in the service of the US economy. This reinforces the US’s lead in innovation and hi-tech industries, giving it a strategic and commercial edge.
…
The Kok report noted glumly that nearly three-quarters of the world’s leading IT companies were from the US, and concluded that “Europe has no option but to radically improve its knowledge economy”. To tackle this gap it recommended establishing a European research council, modelled on the National Science Foundation of the US, as an independent funding body run by scientists and academics, making grants in pure science as well as applied areas such as engineering and social sciences. Yesterday, the issue was debated by EU research ministers, as a first step towards setting up an ERC.
To many interested parties it goes without saying that Europe needs such a body, if only to rid itself of the current cumbersome EU-wide arrangements for research funding. Yet the funding gap between the US and the EU is caused by lower research spending by Europe’s business sector. There is a chicken and egg connection at work: better-targeted and more generous research funding should cause a virtuous spillover into more industrial investment.
It’s discouraging to juxtapose this European perspective of the value of the National Science Foundation and the role of fundamental research in enabling the knowledge economy with recent actions in this country that demonstrate our support for science is waning. One need not look far to see the evidence that federally-supported research has played a key role in the remarkable success of U.S. innovation. My favorite example comes from IT R&D (no surprise). It’s the Computer Science and Telecommunications Board“tire tracks” chart (here’s a larger version (pdf)), which shows 19 areas of research in IT that, with an interplay of federal and industrial support for R&D, became billion dollar markets. The recent cuts by Congress to NSF and other science agencies as part of the FY 2005 Omnibus Appropriations Bill show a disturbing lack of understanding and support of that crucial federal role.
And, if that weren’t bad enough, we’re doing our best to stem the “brain drain” the Europeans show such great concern about by enacting visa policies that do a fair job of keeping the world’s best and brightest away from our shores. Newsweek’s Fareed Zakaria has an interesting piece this week on just that subject: “Rejecting the Next Bill Gates”.
In order to stay competitive we need to remember what made us competitive, and I fear we’re losing sight of that. Clearly, our competitors aren’t.
Here’s some of the agency-by-agency wrap-up in the wake of the FY 2005 Omnibus Bill. We’ve detailed some of the blow-by-blow in the lead-up to final passage here. All figures include the 0.80 percent across-the-board cut imposed on all non-defense agencies to pay for additional spending in other parts of the bill. NSF: NSF will lose $105 million for FY 05 (compared to FY 04), a cut of 1.9%. The largest cut is to the Education and Human Resources Directorate ($98 million, 10%), with most of that cut falling on the Graduate Education and Research, Evaluation & Communication accounts. The Major Research Equipment account will see an increase of about $19 million over FY04. Research and Related Activities (home of CISE) was to be held essentially flat for FY05, but will lose $30 million (0.7%) as the result of the across-the-board cut. Here’s the breakout:
FY 2005 NSF Appropriations (in millions)
Account
FY 2004 Level
FY 05 Budget Request
FY 2005 House Mark
FY 2005 Senate Mark
FY 2005 Final Approps*
$ Change FY 05 Final vs FY 04
% Change FY 05 Final vs FY 04
Research and Related Activities
$4,251
$4,452
$4,152
$4,402
$4,221
-$30
-0.7%
Major Research Equip
$155
$213
$208
$130
$174
$19
12%
Education and Human Resources
$939
$771
$843
$929
$841
-$98
-10%
Salaries and Expenses
$219
$294
$250
$269
$223
$4
1.8%
National Science Board
$4
$4
$4
$4
$4
$0
0%
Inspector General
$10
$10
$10
$10
$10
$0
0%
Total
$5,578
$5,745
$5,467
$5,745
$5,473
-$105
-1.9%
*includes 0.80 percent across-the-board cut
Department of Energy Office of Science: The Office of Science received a 2.8 percent increase over FY 2004, to $3.6 billion. Included in the increase was $30 million for the development of a “Leadership Class” supercomputer at DOE ($25 million for hardware, $5 million for software development). Some additional details here. NIST Labs: The Labs faced a dire funding situation as a result of last year’s omnibus appropriation, but received some of that back this year in the form of a 10 percent increase, to $379 million. Not as good as the Senate appropriation level of $384 million, but better than the House approved level of $375 million. NASA: The NASA budget will increase 4.6 percent for FY 2005 to $16.1 billion, thanks in part to $800 million in additional funding targeted for the President’s Moon and Mars initiative. The $800 million was necessary to avoid a veto from the President and to ensure the support of GOP majority whip Rep. Tom Delay. Unfortunately, given the strict funding constraints placed on the appropriations committee by the congressional leadership and the Administration, the additional funding had to come at the expense of other agencies within the bill. National Institutes of Health: The National Institutes of Health (NIH) budget of $28.6 billion is just 2 percent above last year’s funding level, well off the 15 percent annual increases between 1998 and 2003. Most NIH institutes will receive increases between 1.6 and 2.5 percent. Rep. Vern Ehlers (R-MI) was among the first to issue a press release condemning the decrease in funding for the National Science Foundation in the Omnibus Bill. His press release can be found after the jump.
(Scroll down for the latest updates)
Conflicting rumors abound regarding the outlook for NSF in the FY 05 appropriations process. As House and Senate negotiators attempt to put the finishing touches on an omnibus appropriations bill by Friday or Saturday, word comes that NSF will likely not fare well in the bill. GovExec.comreports that a bit of rule-bending employed by the Senate to “find” an additional $1.2 billion in funding in their version of the VA-HUD-Independent agencies appropriation bill, which includes funding for NSF, isn’t acceptable to the House leadership or the White House budget office. So in order to stay within the budget cap, appropriators will have offset any increase in spending with funding from elsewhere in the bill.
In order to fund the President’s lunar/Mars initiative at NASA, it appears other agencies in the bill will bear the brunt. GovExec.com reports that NSF is slated for a $60 million cut overall compared to the agency’s FY 2004 funding level, but that “research funding” — presumably the agency’s Research and Related Activities account, which contains funding for NSF CISE — will “remain frozen” at FY 2004 levels.
A second rumor making the rounds suggests that the situation at NSF may be even more grim, with funding levels below the levels approved by the House appropriations committee. That level, you may recall, would be a 2.0 percent reduction in NSF’s budget compared to FY 2004.
We continue to press Congress on the importance of supporting funding at NSF at adequate levels. Keep an eye on this space for the latest details…. Update (11/19 12:30pm): Now hearing that the $60 million cut to NSF’s non-research account is in addition to an across-the-board 0.75 percent to all agencies, which would translate into another $41 million from NSF. Also hearing the bill will be released at 2 pm today. Update (11/20 11:30am): We’ve got the final numbers for NSF in the bill. $98 million cut from the Education and Human Resources account (plus an increase of $19 million to the Major Research Equipment account), and an across-the-board cut of 0.75 percent. Here’s a copy of <a href=bill language (pdf, 360kb) for NSF. Here’s the final breakout:
FY 2005 NSF Appropriations (in millions)
Account
FY 2004 Level
FY 05 Budget Request
FY 2005 House Mark
FY 2005 Senate Mark
FY 2005 Final Approps*
$ Change FY 05 Final vs FY 04
% Change FY 05 Final vs FY 04
Research and Related Activities
$4,251
$4,452
$4,152
$4,402
$4,221
-$30
-0.7%
Major Research Equip
$155
$213
$208
$130
$174
$19
12%
Education and Human Resources
$939
$771
$843
$929
$841
-$98
-10%
Salaries and Expenses
$219
$294
$250
$269
$223
$4
1.8%
National Science Board
$4
$4
$4
$4
$4
$0
0%
Inspector General
$10
$10
$10
$10
$10
$0
0%
Total
$5,578
$5,745
$5,467
$5,745
$5,473
-$105
-1.9%
*includes 0.80 percent across-the-board cut
Last Update: We’ve got the joint statement from the conferees regarding the NSF funding levels online now.
I lied. One More Update: Two things. One, the Energy and Water Appropriations bill did make it into the Omnibus, and it did contain $30 million for DOE’s Leadership Class Supercomputer ($25 million for hardware, $5 million for software development) we’ve coveredrecently. Two, the across the board cut was actually 0.8%, not 0.75% as I reported above. I’ll make the corrections soon, but at NSF’s level of resolution, it shouldn’t change things too much. Ok, chart is updated (11/22).
The House today re-passed HR 4516, the High End Computing Revitalization Act of 2004, which would authorize the creation of a “leadership class” supercomputer at DOE and a “High-end Software Development Center.” The House action means that the bill will now head to the President, who is expected to sign it.
We’ve covered the bill in detail in this space previously. Because it’s an authorization, it doesn’t actually include any money (just “authorizes” sums to be spent should the money get appropriated). Funding for a “leadership class” computer ($30 million, including $25 million for hardware) is included in the House version of the FY 2005 Energy and Water appropriations bill. However, it’s unlikely that bill will make it into the Omnibus Appropriations bill expected to be considered later this week because portions dealing with the proposed Yucca Mountain nuclear waste repository are deemed too contentious to get resolved before Congress adjourns. This means those agencies funded under the Energy and Water bill may not get an appropriation for FY 05 and may instead operate under a special “continuing resolution.” It’s not clear at this point what that continuing resolution might look like and whether or not it would contain any funding for the proposed supercomputer.
We’ll have a better idea by Thanksgiving when the 108th Congress is expected to adjourn for good.
The House Science Committee issued a press release marking the passage of HR 4516, but it doesn’t appear to be on their website yet. You can find it after the jump. Update: The Chronicle of Higher Ed has more (sub req’d), including a quote from CRA board member Dan Reed:
Daniel A. Reed, vice chancellor for information technology at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, said that the law would increase the political visibility of supercomputing in the United States. Mr. Reed and other supporters of the bill say that the American supercomputing industry has lost its competitiveness and is not making products that can be used for cutting-edge research.
“This will help put it back on the front burner,” Mr. Reed said.
Update (11/22): The Energy and Water appropriations bill referred to above did get included in the Omnibus Appropriations bill, and it did include $30 million for DOE’s Leadership Class computing effort — $25 million for hardware, $5 million for software development. Update (11/30): The President has signed the bill!
The goal is to give all American commanders and troops a moving picture of all foreign enemies and threats – “a God’s-eye view” of battle.
This “Internet in the sky,” Peter Teets, under secretary of the Air Force, told Congress, would allow “marines in a Humvee, in a faraway land, in the middle of a rainstorm, to open up their laptops, request imagery” from a spy satellite, and “get it downloaded within seconds.”
The total cost of the project is expected to run to $24 billion over the next five years, plus an additional $5 billion for data encryption technologies.
Weiner quotes Vint Cerf in the piece, who is consulting on the project:
Vint Cerf, one of the fathers of the Internet and a Pentagon consultant on the war net, said he wondered if the military’s dream was realistic. “I want to make sure what we realize is vision and not hallucination,” Mr. Cerf said.
“This is sort of like Star Wars, where the policy was, ‘Let’s go out and build this system,’ and technology lagged far behind,” he said. “There’s nothing wrong with having ambitious goals. You just need to temper them with physics and reality.”
As we’ve noted before, DOD funding policies — especially at DARPA — have likely hamstrung some of technological progress that will be required to make full use of DOD’s network-centric strategy. University researchers, who played an important role in the development of the ARPANET, are increasingly unable to participate in DARPA-led networking research because much of that work is classified. Additionally, the style of the DARPA-sponsored research — more short-term rather than long-term — and a milestone-based approach to awarding the funding, with go/no-go decisions at 12 to 18 month intervals, isn’t well-suited to a university research setting. Because researchers are unwilling to propose work that can’t demonstrate results in 12-18 months, what’s proposed tends to be evolutionary, incremental research, rather than revolutionary proposals. And it looks like the new network may need some revolutionary proposals to reach its full potential:
To realize this vision, the military must solve a persistent problem. It all boils down to bandwidth.
Bandwidth measures how much data can flow between electronic devices. Too little for civilians means a Web page takes forever to load. Too little for soldiers means the war net will not work.
The bandwidth requirements seem bottomless. The military will need 40 or 50 times what it used at the height of the Iraq war last year, a Rand Corporation study estimates – enough to give front-line soldiers bandwidth equal to downloading three feature-length movies a second.
The Congressional Research Service said the Army, despite plans to spend $20 billion on the problem, may wind up with a tenth of the bandwidth it needs. The Army, in its “lessons learned” report from Iraq, published in May, said “there will probably never be enough resources to establish a complete and functioning network of communications, sensors, and systems everywhere in the world.”
The bottleneck is already great. In Iraq, front-line commanders and troops fight frequent software freezes. “To make net-centric warfare a reality,” said Tony Montemarano, the Defense Information Security Agency’s bandwidth expansion chief, “we will have to precipitously enhance bandwidth.”
As we’ve reportedrecently, the House and Senate Appropriations Committees have approved two markedly different versions of the FY 05 VA-HUD-Independent Agencies Appropriations bill that contains funding for NSF and NASA. The House bill, which stuck strictly to House approved budget caps, cut NSF by 2.0 percent across the board. The Senate bill employed some rule-bending and freed up enough funding in the bill to provide NSF with a 3 percent increase (the President’s requested level), including a 4.1% increase for CISE. Neither bill made it far enough in the appropriations process to get approval from either chamber.
It now appears that the VA-HUD bill will get folded in to the omnibus appropriations bill expected to be assembled when Congress returns on Nov 16th, but will include numbers far more similar to the House levels than the Senate.
In response to the original House bill, CRA activated its Computing Research Advocacy Network (CRAN) to urge the Senate to adopt higher numbers for NSF and the Computer and Information Science and Engineering (CISE) in particular. CRAN’s effort was reasonably successful: CISE’s increase in the Senate bill was the largest of any of the major directorates.
In response to the latest developments, CRA is once again calling on CRAN to get involved. Members of the appropriations conference committee need to hear from CRAN members, especially those whose representatives sit on the House and Senate Appropriations committee (who will serve as the conferees), about the importance of supporting NSF at the highest possible level. And they need to hear before November 16th!.
We’ve updated the CRAN Alert page to reflect the new situation and changed our sample letters as well. If you’re a member of CRAN, please contact your Senators and Representative in the House. If you’re not, please join!
We’ll have more details on the effort and the outcome as they emerge.
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Tom Friedman on NSF Funding
/In: Funding /by AndyBernatThomas Friedman’s editorial in the New York Times today hits Congress hard for approving a cut to the National Science Foundation in the Omnibus Appropriations bill. A sample:
Read the whole thing here.
Update: The San Jose Mercury News agrees.
Catching Up: Update on PITAC Cyber Security Efforts
/In: Policy, Research, Security /by Peter HarshaThis article I spotted today in Government Computer News on former Director of DHS’ National Cybersecurity Division Amit Yoran’s thoughts about DHS’ niche in federal cybersecurity efforts reminded me that I hadn’t provided an update on what I thought was a very interesting meeting of PITAC’s Subcommittee on Cybersecurity R&D a week ago last Friday.
The Subcommittee is in the process of evaluating the federal government’s efforts in supporting cybersecurity research and development — trying to figure out how well the government is targeting the right research areas, whether there’s good balance between short-term and long-term research, whether we’re doing all we can to improve technology transfer, and whether we’re well prepared for the security challenges of the future. The goal is to produce a final report the full PITAC can approve at its March 2005 meeting. So far the subcommittee has produced a first draft, which is what was presented by Subcommittee Chair F. Thomson Leighton at the Nov 19th meeting.
And that first draft is very good. It’s clear the committee has taken to heart much of the testimony it has received, including testimony CRA submitted to the committee last July. Leighton’s slide presentation (pdf) does a good job of laying out the details, but I thought I’d summarize them a bit here.
The committee has identified four main issues: 1) Problems with civilian cyber security research; 2) Problems with the size of the cyber security basic research community; 3) Tech transfer issues; and 4) The coordination of cyber security R&D. They seem to have devoted quite a bit of attention to the first issue, and the points that they raise are all right on the money (and concerns CRA shares), namely:
I think this is all excellent, and basically in agreement with the testimony CRA provided back in July. About the only thing of which I would have liked to have seen discussion is the issue of the potential (and real) chilling effect on research of laws aimed at protecting intellectual property and privacy — most notably the impediment to research posed by provisions of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act. As we noted in our testimony (by stealing excellent language from our affiliate ACM’s U.S. Public Policy Office):
Other than that, I’m pretty happy with what I’ve seen from the report so far. (Please read through the slides to get the details on the other three issues the subcommittee identified.) If the final report contains the important discussion of the character of research supported by each of the federal agencies funding cyber security efforts and the subcommittee’s funding recommendations, it will be a strong document that should prove very useful in the computing research community’s efforts to reshape cyber security R&D policy at federal agencies (see in particular the subcommittee’s discussions about the nature and amount of research sponsored by DHS — too short-term and too little, in sum).
We’ll continue to keep an eye on the committee’s progress….
Oh, and just to get back to the article that triggered this post in the first place, I think it’s important to note that though this:
implies that DHS is spending $18 million on basic research in cyber security, this isn’t actually the case (as the subcommittee points out on slide 25). The agency currently spends just $1.5 million on research that can truly be considered basic, long-term research. The remaining $16.5 million is spent on short-term activities.
Still, it’s encouraging that Yoran at least acknowledges that the agency is lacking in its support for fundamental research. Hopefully his replacement will as well — and do something about it.
More NY Times: NSF Appropriations Cut
/In: Funding /by Peter HarshaKudos to the New York Times for noting the disconnect between Congress earmarking funds for questionable projects and, at the same time, cutting funding for the agency responsible for fueling much of the innovation that has driven our economy and improved our health and welfare.
From the article:
And the Times is right to contrast the increases with the cuts. With budget caps as tight as they are — discretionary spending increasing just 4 percent, with that increase in a select few agencies (DOD and NASA, most notably in R&D) — appropriations are truly a zero-sum game. Funding for new earmarks must come out of existing funding. In FY 2004, earmarks accounted for nearly $2 billion of the federal R&D budget. In FY 2005, it’s likely to be even higher (though I don’t yet have the numbers).
In any case, I’m pleased to see that the mainstream press is beginning to bang the drum about the dangers of underfunding fundamental research. Maybe it’ll have some positive effect on the FY 2006 budget process…(which has already begun!).
Here’s the full article.
Also here’s recent coverage of the NSF cuts.
NY Times OpEd on Foreign Students
/In: Policy /by Peter HarshaThanks to Moshe Vardi for the head’s up about this Op-Ed from Joseph S. Nye in today’s New York Times concerning the decline in foreign student enrollment in American universities, due in large part to the nightmare that is the current U.S. visa process. It jives well with the Fareed Zakaria piece I linked to yesterday. Here’s a key bit:
Read the whole thing here.
Are We Taking NSF for Granted? (no pun…)
/In: Policy /by Peter HarshaStumbled upon this interesting article from the UK’s Guardian detailing the recognition growing in the EU about the need for an agency similar to the US’ National Science Foundation as a way to help the union “radically improve its knowledge economy.” The article describes a European commission report earlier this month that noted U.S. R&D funding, currently at about $395 billion (£210 billion) total (that’s industry and federal), has been a key reason for continued US dominance in innovation and hi-tech industries.
It’s discouraging to juxtapose this European perspective of the value of the National Science Foundation and the role of fundamental research in enabling the knowledge economy with recent actions in this country that demonstrate our support for science is waning. One need not look far to see the evidence that federally-supported research has played a key role in the remarkable success of U.S. innovation. My favorite example comes from IT R&D (no surprise). It’s the Computer Science and Telecommunications Board “tire tracks” chart (here’s a larger version (pdf)), which shows 19 areas of research in IT that, with an interplay of federal and industrial support for R&D, became billion dollar markets. The recent cuts by Congress to NSF and other science agencies as part of the FY 2005 Omnibus Appropriations Bill show a disturbing lack of understanding and support of that crucial federal role.
And, if that weren’t bad enough, we’re doing our best to stem the “brain drain” the Europeans show such great concern about by enacting visa policies that do a fair job of keeping the world’s best and brightest away from our shores. Newsweek’s Fareed Zakaria has an interesting piece this week on just that subject: “Rejecting the Next Bill Gates”.
In order to stay competitive we need to remember what made us competitive, and I fear we’re losing sight of that. Clearly, our competitors aren’t.
Appropriations Roundup
/In: Funding /by Peter HarshaHere’s some of the agency-by-agency wrap-up in the wake of the FY 2005 Omnibus Bill. We’ve detailed some of the blow-by-blow in the lead-up to final passage here. All figures include the 0.80 percent across-the-board cut imposed on all non-defense agencies to pay for additional spending in other parts of the bill.
NSF: NSF will lose $105 million for FY 05 (compared to FY 04), a cut of 1.9%. The largest cut is to the Education and Human Resources Directorate ($98 million, 10%), with most of that cut falling on the Graduate Education and Research, Evaluation & Communication accounts. The Major Research Equipment account will see an increase of about $19 million over FY04. Research and Related Activities (home of CISE) was to be held essentially flat for FY05, but will lose $30 million (0.7%) as the result of the across-the-board cut. Here’s the breakout:
Department of Energy Office of Science: The Office of Science received a 2.8 percent increase over FY 2004, to $3.6 billion. Included in the increase was $30 million for the development of a “Leadership Class” supercomputer at DOE ($25 million for hardware, $5 million for software development). Some additional details here.
NIST Labs: The Labs faced a dire funding situation as a result of last year’s omnibus appropriation, but received some of that back this year in the form of a 10 percent increase, to $379 million. Not as good as the Senate appropriation level of $384 million, but better than the House approved level of $375 million.
NASA: The NASA budget will increase 4.6 percent for FY 2005 to $16.1 billion, thanks in part to $800 million in additional funding targeted for the President’s Moon and Mars initiative. The $800 million was necessary to avoid a veto from the President and to ensure the support of GOP majority whip Rep. Tom Delay. Unfortunately, given the strict funding constraints placed on the appropriations committee by the congressional leadership and the Administration, the additional funding had to come at the expense of other agencies within the bill.
National Institutes of Health: The National Institutes of Health (NIH) budget of $28.6 billion is just 2 percent above last year’s funding level, well off the 15 percent annual increases between 1998 and 2003. Most NIH institutes will receive increases between 1.6 and 2.5 percent.
Rep. Vern Ehlers (R-MI) was among the first to issue a press release condemning the decrease in funding for the National Science Foundation in the Omnibus Bill. His press release can be found after the jump.
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NSF FY 2005 Appropriations Update
/In: Funding /by Peter Harsha(Scroll down for the latest updates)
Conflicting rumors abound regarding the outlook for NSF in the FY 05 appropriations process. As House and Senate negotiators attempt to put the finishing touches on an omnibus appropriations bill by Friday or Saturday, word comes that NSF will likely not fare well in the bill. GovExec.com reports that a bit of rule-bending employed by the Senate to “find” an additional $1.2 billion in funding in their version of the VA-HUD-Independent agencies appropriation bill, which includes funding for NSF, isn’t acceptable to the House leadership or the White House budget office. So in order to stay within the budget cap, appropriators will have offset any increase in spending with funding from elsewhere in the bill.
In order to fund the President’s lunar/Mars initiative at NASA, it appears other agencies in the bill will bear the brunt. GovExec.com reports that NSF is slated for a $60 million cut overall compared to the agency’s FY 2004 funding level, but that “research funding” — presumably the agency’s Research and Related Activities account, which contains funding for NSF CISE — will “remain frozen” at FY 2004 levels.
A second rumor making the rounds suggests that the situation at NSF may be even more grim, with funding levels below the levels approved by the House appropriations committee. That level, you may recall, would be a 2.0 percent reduction in NSF’s budget compared to FY 2004.
We continue to press Congress on the importance of supporting funding at NSF at adequate levels. Keep an eye on this space for the latest details….
Update (11/19 12:30pm): Now hearing that the $60 million cut to NSF’s non-research account is in addition to an across-the-board 0.75 percent to all agencies, which would translate into another $41 million from NSF. Also hearing the bill will be released at 2 pm today.
Update (11/20 11:30am): We’ve got the final numbers for NSF in the bill. $98 million cut from the Education and Human Resources account (plus an increase of $19 million to the Major Research Equipment account), and an across-the-board cut of 0.75 percent. Here’s a copy of <a href=bill language (pdf, 360kb) for NSF. Here’s the final breakout:
(in millions)
Level
Budget Request
House Mark
Senate Mark
Final Approps*
FY 05 Final vs FY 04
FY 05 Final vs FY 04
Last Update: We’ve got the joint statement from the conferees regarding the NSF funding levels online now.
I lied. One More Update: Two things. One, the Energy and Water Appropriations bill did make it into the Omnibus, and it did contain $30 million for DOE’s Leadership Class Supercomputer ($25 million for hardware, $5 million for software development) we’ve covered recently.
Two, the across the board cut was actually 0.8%, not 0.75% as I reported above. I’ll make the corrections soon, but at NSF’s level of resolution, it shouldn’t change things too much.Ok, chart is updated (11/22).Supercomputing Authorization Heads to President
/In: Funding /by Peter HarshaThe House today re-passed HR 4516, the High End Computing Revitalization Act of 2004, which would authorize the creation of a “leadership class” supercomputer at DOE and a “High-end Software Development Center.” The House action means that the bill will now head to the President, who is expected to sign it.
We’ve covered the bill in detail in this space previously. Because it’s an authorization, it doesn’t actually include any money (just “authorizes” sums to be spent should the money get appropriated). Funding for a “leadership class” computer ($30 million, including $25 million for hardware) is included in the House version of the FY 2005 Energy and Water appropriations bill. However, it’s unlikely that bill will make it into the Omnibus Appropriations bill expected to be considered later this week because portions dealing with the proposed Yucca Mountain nuclear waste repository are deemed too contentious to get resolved before Congress adjourns. This means those agencies funded under the Energy and Water bill may not get an appropriation for FY 05 and may instead operate under a special “continuing resolution.” It’s not clear at this point what that continuing resolution might look like and whether or not it would contain any funding for the proposed supercomputer.
We’ll have a better idea by Thanksgiving when the 108th Congress is expected to adjourn for good.
The House Science Committee issued a press release marking the passage of HR 4516, but it doesn’t appear to be on their website yet. You can find it after the jump.
Update: The Chronicle of Higher Ed has more (sub req’d), including a quote from CRA board member Dan Reed:
Update (11/22): The Energy and Water appropriations bill referred to above did get included in the Omnibus Appropriations bill, and it did include $30 million for DOE’s Leadership Class computing effort — $25 million for hardware, $5 million for software development.
Update (11/30): The President has signed the bill!
Read more →
NY Times on the DOD’s “War Net”
/In: Research /by Peter HarshaTim Weiner has an interesting piece in today’s New York Times about the Defense Department’s efforts to build it’s own Internet — the Global Information Grid. From the article:
The total cost of the project is expected to run to $24 billion over the next five years, plus an additional $5 billion for data encryption technologies.
Weiner quotes Vint Cerf in the piece, who is consulting on the project:
As we’ve noted before, DOD funding policies — especially at DARPA — have likely hamstrung some of technological progress that will be required to make full use of DOD’s network-centric strategy. University researchers, who played an important role in the development of the ARPANET, are increasingly unable to participate in DARPA-led networking research because much of that work is classified. Additionally, the style of the DARPA-sponsored research — more short-term rather than long-term — and a milestone-based approach to awarding the funding, with go/no-go decisions at 12 to 18 month intervals, isn’t well-suited to a university research setting. Because researchers are unwilling to propose work that can’t demonstrate results in 12-18 months, what’s proposed tends to be evolutionary, incremental research, rather than revolutionary proposals. And it looks like the new network may need some revolutionary proposals to reach its full potential:
Anyway, an interesting piece. Read the whole thing.
VA-HUD Appropriations Update…Not Good
/In: Funding /by Peter HarshaAs we’ve reported recently, the House and Senate Appropriations Committees have approved two markedly different versions of the FY 05 VA-HUD-Independent Agencies Appropriations bill that contains funding for NSF and NASA. The House bill, which stuck strictly to House approved budget caps, cut NSF by 2.0 percent across the board. The Senate bill employed some rule-bending and freed up enough funding in the bill to provide NSF with a 3 percent increase (the President’s requested level), including a 4.1% increase for CISE. Neither bill made it far enough in the appropriations process to get approval from either chamber.
It now appears that the VA-HUD bill will get folded in to the omnibus appropriations bill expected to be assembled when Congress returns on Nov 16th, but will include numbers far more similar to the House levels than the Senate.
In response to the original House bill, CRA activated its Computing Research Advocacy Network (CRAN) to urge the Senate to adopt higher numbers for NSF and the Computer and Information Science and Engineering (CISE) in particular. CRAN’s effort was reasonably successful: CISE’s increase in the Senate bill was the largest of any of the major directorates.
In response to the latest developments, CRA is once again calling on CRAN to get involved. Members of the appropriations conference committee need to hear from CRAN members, especially those whose representatives sit on the House and Senate Appropriations committee (who will serve as the conferees), about the importance of supporting NSF at the highest possible level. And they need to hear before November 16th!.
We’ve updated the CRAN Alert page to reflect the new situation and changed our sample letters as well. If you’re a member of CRAN, please contact your Senators and Representative in the House. If you’re not, please join!
We’ll have more details on the effort and the outcome as they emerge.