Early word out of yesterday’s Senate Appropriations Committee markup is that NSF ended up with a 3 percent increase over FY 2004, matching the President’s budget request. That’s $5.75 billion for FY 05, $169 million over FY 2004, and significantly better than the House’s 2 percent cut to NSF’s overall budget.
Still, we’re a long way from the 15 percent increases authorized by Congress and signed by the President in December 2002 in the NSF Authorization. Given inflation, that 3 percent increase won’t mean many new opportunities for the agency.
More details about specific programs as I get them.
Update: 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
$ Change FY 05 Senate vs. FY 04
% Change FY 05 Senate vs. FY 04
Research and Related Activities
$4,251
$4,452
$4,152
$4,402
$151
3.6%
Major Research Equip
$155
$213
$208
$130
-$25
-16.2%
Education and Human Resources
$939
$771
$843
$929
-$10
-1.1%
Salaries and Expenses
$219
$294
$250
$269
$50
18.3%
National Science Board
$4
$4
$4
$4
$0
0%
Inspector General
$10
$10
$10
$10
$0
0%
Total
$5,578
$5,745
$5,467
$5,745
$167
2.99%
Another Update: Here’s the directorate by directorate breakout:
NSF Directorate by Directorate Appropriations (in millions)
Directorate
FY 2004 (est)
FY 2005 Request
FY 2005 Senate Mark
$ Change FY 05 Senate vs. FY 04
% Change FY 05 Senate vs. FY 04
Biological Sciences
$587
$600
$605
$18
3.1%
Computer and Information Science
$605
$618
$630
$25
4.1%
Engineering
$565
$576
$576
$11
1.9%
Geosciences
$713
$729
$729
$15
2.2%
Mathematical and Physical Sciences
$1,092
$1,116
$1,123
$31
2.8%
Social Behavioral and Economic Sciences
$204
$225
$225
$21
10.3%
Polar Programs
$342
$350
$350
$8
2.3%
Integrative Activities
$144
$240
$165
$21
14.6%
Final Update: So, it appears computing did a little better than average in the Senate mark. Only SBE and “Integrative Activities” had higher levels of increase vs. FY 2004 than CISE, and they have considerably smaller baselines. CISE benefited in part from an increase to the Information Technology Research (ITR) line vs. the President’s budget request. The program had been slated to decrease to $178 million for FY 05, but was bumped up to $190 million in the Senate mark. The remainder of the increase is apparently spread throughout the core research programs in CISE.
Here are some snippets relevant to computing research from the Committee Report:
NSF has completed the planned 5-year priority for Information Technology Research [ITR] within Computer and Information Science and Engineering [CISE], yet the ITR program has also increased our understanding of computing, communications, and information systems as well as the areas of large-scale networking, new high-end architectures, high-data-volume instruments, and information management. To continue this fundamental research, the Committee has provided $190,000,000 to ITR within CISE.
I think a part of the credit for IT R&D remaining a priority within this appropriation has to go to all those who participated in CRA’s CRAN activity to urge members of the Senate to recognize the critical role NSF plays in leading the federal IT R&D effort, and how critical that effort, in turn, is to the future of innovation in this country.
But there’s still more to be done. Neither the House nor the Senate bills have yet come before their respective bodies — and it’s likely neither will before the election. What is likely is that the bills will get bundled together as part of an omnibus appropriations bill that contains all of the unfinished FY 2005 appropriations bills (currently numbering 12) and passed en masse. How the discrepancies between the cuts in the House bill and the more generous Senate bill get resolved is still an open question. If you haven’t yet contacted your Senators and House Member, there’s still time!
CRA Chair Jim Foley sat for an extended interview with CNET News.com on the state of the IT research enterprise in the US. Here’s the intro:
James Foley is worried.
As chairman of the Computing Research Association–a group made up of academic departments, research centers and professional societies–his job at CRA is to improve computing research and education. But Foley sees troubling trends in the nation’s system for nurturing and training new information technology scientists.
The number of doctorate degrees awarded in the United States has dropped not only in computer science and engineering, but also in noncomputer science and engineering fields in general. And top U.S. undergraduate computer science departments are seeing enrollments fall.
Some industry analysts argue that the country already has a glut of Ph.D.s. But to Foley, also a professor at the Georgia Institute of Technology College of Computing, the educational declines may very well contribute to an economic malaise. He wants to excite youngsters about computers, in part through better-trained teachers. Foley would also pump up federal research funding and give young scholars independent funding.
CNET News.com recently spoke with Foley about computer science education, the flow of programming work offshore and how the computer science profession in America can weather the trend toward offshoring.
The U.S. Public Policy Committee of ACM — one of CRA’s affiliate organizations — has joined a broad coalition of groups who have written (pdf) to the members of the US Senate urging them to “slow down” their efforts to pass legislation (called INDUCE) that would create a new form of secondary liability for copyright infringement. The Senate Judiciary Committee is poised to act on recommended language prepared by the U.S. Copyright Office that would hold technology makers and service providers liable for copyright violations by end users even if they never knew, contemplated, or intended to facilitate user infringement.
In an earlier letter to the Senate Judiciary Committee, USACM rightly cautioned “that the legislation’s flawed approach of restricting technology rather than focusing on individual acts of infringement could have serious unintended consequences which could undermine continued innovations in software and digital computing and introduce new liabilities for technology developers.”
In the latest letter, the coalition — which includes Google, Yahoo!, Public Knowledge, Intel, IEEE-USA, Sun Microsystems, Consumer Electronics Association, Verizon, Radio Shack, Earthlink, the Association of American Universities, Texas Instruments, and the National Venture Capital Association — raises concerns about the Copyright Office recommendations:
The Copyright Office’s most recent approach would create a new form of strict copyright liability for a large class of providers of hardware, software and services used in conjunction with the electronic or physical dissemination of goods, services and information. These companies and institutions could be found liable without regard to their knowledge, intent, or relationship to the infringer, simply for providing a product, service, facility or financing. All it takes to be found liable is to meet one of the three vague criteria proposed by the Copyright Office, which are to be applied to some undefined subset of a defendant’s products or services. As a result, anyone involved in the dissemination technologies could be strictly liable when it unknowingly derives revenue that may be small in relation to its own provision of goods and services. Perhaps most troubling, entities that participate in the Internet and other electronic space would have no way of structuring their activities to anticipate and avoid — or even minimize — these risks.
You can read the whole thing here (pdf). The USACM has a bit more background, including the previous letter, on their home page. And the Electronic Frontier Foundation has more detail here.
As the federal government approaches the end of the 2004 fiscal year (on September 30, 2004), Congress has, to date, completed only one of the 13 annual appropriations bills necessary to fund the operations of government. They have, however, made some progress on others, including some actions that impact computing researchers. Here’s an update on where we stand: Defense (P.L. 108-287): The FY 2005 Defense Appropriation has the distinction of being the only appropriations bill that has been signed into law (P.L. 108-287). Researchers fared reasonably well under the bill. Aggregate basic research funding at the Department of Defense (DOD), so-called “6.1” research in DOD parlance, will rise to $1.5 billion in FY 2005, an increase of 7.8 percent or $110 million over the FY 2004 appropriated level. DOD applied research (“6.2”), will increase 11.9 percent to $4.9 billion, and advanced technology development (“6.3”) will rise 9.8 percent to $6.2 billion in FY 2005. All together, the Defense science and technology account (6.1, 6.2, and 6.3 research and development) will increase 10.3 percent or $1.2 billion, to $13.3 billion overall in FY 2005.
Of particular importance to computing researchers, the Defense-wide “Computing Systems and Communications Technology” program line which includes much of the funding for IT R&D at DOD and DARPA has been split into two program lines. The new “Information and Communications Technology” line will receive $192.7 million in funding in FY 2005, and the new “Cognitive Computing Systems” account will receive $151.2 million in FY 2005. Their combined $344 million represents about $1.2 million more than the President requested for FY 2005, and $5.5 million more than FY 2004.
Also the “High Performance Computing Modernization Program” received an increase of $32.7 million or 15.9 percent over FY 2004, increasing to $238 million for FY 2005.
Full details on the branch-by-branch funding breakouts are included in a table after the jump.
Additional Link: The final conference report. VA-HUD-Independent Agencies (HR 5041): The VA-HUD bill includes funding for the National Science Foundation and NASA. So far, the only action taken on the VA-HUD bill has been a markup of the House version of the bill in the House Appropriations Committee. As we’ve covered previously, the House Appropriations committee bill would cut NSF’s overall budget by 2.0 percent — about $73 million — from FY 2004, a level $194 million below the President’s requested level and well below the 15 percent per year increase authorized by Congress and approved by the President in 2002. The bill achieves the cuts by stopping three programs planned for starts in FY 2005 — the 21st Workforce Initiative, a new class of Science and Technology Centers, and a proposed Innovation Fund — and by calling for $18.7 million of cuts out of unspecified current programs.
The situation is potentially more dire given that a large cut to NASA’s budget in the bill ($1.1 billion below the President’s requested level) has led to a veto threat from the Administration and angry words from Rep. Tom Delay, an influential member of the House Republican leadership who now represents large portions of the NASA Houston workforce. Mitigating those cuts enough to enable Delay and the Administration to sign off on the bill may require finding funding elsewhere in the bill to cover NASA’s shortfall, so NSF may find its budget once again under the knife.
The situation may be somewhat better in the Senate VA-HUD bill. Though the Senate has not yet marked up the bill, it has been suggested that some creative bookkeeping (namely, declaring spending for the Veterans’ Administration in the bill “emergency spending” related to the war effort) might free some additional money from the budget cap. While there’s no guarantee NSF would see any of that additional funding in the bill, the agency is expected to fare better. At this point, however, no numbers are available.
CRA has joined with many other scientific societies to urge members of Congress to reject the proposed cuts in the VA-HUD bill, but there’s still time for you to help as well. CRA’s Computing Research Advocacy Network has been very active in contacting members of the Senate and House in support of NSF funding. In order to get involved, see CRAN’s Advocacy Alert page, with a complete background on the issue, sample letters, and contact information for your representatives in Congress. Commerce, Justice, State (CJS) (HR 4754, S. 2809): Includes funding for the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA). We’ve detailed the dire funding situation faced by NIST at the start of the 2004 fiscal year. A $22 million cut to the agency’s budget in the FY 2004 appropriation left it unable to move forward on much of its cyber security work and led to layoffs of some lab personnel.
Both the House and Senate have marked up their FY 2005 CJS appropriations bills. The Senate bill would funnel more funding to the NIST Labs than the House version, adding $43 million to the FY 2004 number for a total of $384 million for FY 2005. In contrast, the House version would provide $375 million for FY 2005. Both versions are still well short of the Administration’s request of $423 million.
However, the Senate took a completely different path than the House regarding the controversial Advanced Technology Program. The House bill and the President’s budget request both zeroed out the $177 million ATP program, but the Senate version would actually increase the program by 14.5 percent to $203 million. It’s not clear how this significant divergence of opinion will get resolved.
Of note to computing researchers, the Senate bill would set aside $3 million for quantum computing research, with the committee noting that a breakthrough in quantum computing technology would rival that of the transistor 50 years ago. Homeland Security (HR 4567, S. 2537): Both the House and Senate have marked up their respective versions of the Homeland Security bill; both have the same relatively small investment of $18 million in cyber security research and development for FY 2005 out of a total Homeland Security S&T budget of over $1.0 billion. Outlook: As noted previously, it’s likely most of the work on the outstanding appropriations bills won’t move forward until after the election, when Congress returns in lame duck session. Until then, the federal government will operate under a “continuing resolution,” which will fund all government agencies at current funding levels and freeze any new starts until the remaining bills are passed. The odds are also pretty good that Congress will elect not to do anything during the lame duck session and instead punt to the new Congress in January. About the only factor opposing that is that both Appropriations chairman will have to relinquish their posts in the new Congress (due to committee term limits), so both would rather deal with the issues during their term, rather than after.
On the other hand, continuing resolutions are very appealing to fiscal conservatives in the Congress because it forces federal agencies to freeze new spending for the duration of the resolution.
In any case, don’t expect much to get settled until after the election.
More details as they emerge….
The Senate Committee on Energy and Natural Resources passed a modified version of a House bill that would authorize the Secretary of Energy to develop a “leadership class” supercomputer and establish a “High-end Software Development Center.”
The bill, HR 4516, is a melding of the House version of HR 4516, introduced by Reps. Judy Biggert (R-IL) and Lincoln Davis (D-TN) and Senate bill S. 2176, introduced by Sens. Lamar Alexander (R-TN) and Jeff Bingaman (D-NM). Both bills are loosely based on the recommendations from the High End Computing Revitalization Task Force Workshop CRA hosted in June, 2003. (We’ve covered both bills hererecently.)
The compromise bill adopts the House’s less prescriptive (and lower) authorized funding amounts ($50 million in FY 05, $55 million in FY 06, $60 million in FY 07), but adds the software development center from the Senate bill and strips language added at the insistence of Rep. Brad Sherman that would have required a study on the implications of artificial intelligence research.
Next stop for the compromise bill is reconsideration by both the House and Senate. The modifications to the bill should help ensure quick passage in both chambers.
The DC rumor mill (well, the science community subset) is buzzing about an Administration announcement tomorrow of a new NSF Director nominee to replace Acting Director Arden Bement. Bement has been “Acting” director since Rita Colwell resigned the post in February, but current law apparently precludes anyone from serving as an “Acting” director for more than 210 days (a term that would on Sept 19th). The rumor suggests that the Administration will name someone other than Bement to take the position, but it’s a toss-up as to who that will be.
More details as they emerge…. Update (12:30, 9/15/04): Looks like it’s Bement. No official announcement yet, though. Another Update: Here’s the e-mail Bement sent NSF employees today:
NATIONAL SCIENCE FOUNDATION OFFICE OF THE DIRECTOR ARLINGTON, VA 22230
STAFF MEMORANDUM
O/D 03-07 September 15, 2004
SUBJECT: Nomination for the Director of the National Science Foundation
The President today announced my nomination to be the next Director of NSF. This is an extraordinary and inspiring honor for me — and one that I feel very humble in accepting.
The Foundation has a rich history of strong and independent Directors, and I look forward to continuing with that tradition. Most important to our success, however, are you — the staff of NSF. I have come to appreciate your strong qualities and dedication that provide the underpinnings for NSF’s organizational excellence. As many of you already know, the Foundation’s mission and our accomplishments are critical to the Nation’s well being. Without your help and dedication, none of NSF’s goals or objectives can be met. I appreciate your support.
Although NSF faces significant challenges in the near future due to Federal budget issues, I am committed to the policies and operations that have stood the test of time and have helped make NSF an extraordinary agency. I look forward to working with Dr. Bordogna and all of you in continuing the outstanding manner in which NSF leads the nation. Our pursuit of research and education at the frontiers of science and engineering, our commitment to broadening participation both within and without the Foundation, and our desire to ensure that we have the resources to carry out this vision will be among my top priorities.
During the upcoming months I will continue as Acting Director while my nomination is pending. I will continue to devote my energies to moving the Foundation forward. I thank you in advance for working with me and look forward to meeting many more of you personally in the days ahead.
Arden L. Bement, Jr.
Acting Director
Distribution: All employees
Tech Daily’s William New and Sarah Lai Stirland have a piece today (sub. req’d) on the White House’s 2003 Presidential Early Career Awards for Scientists and Engineers in which Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz praised the role of science and technology in America’s victory in the Cold War.
At the ceremony, Wolfowitz said he considered pursuing a doctorate in chemistry at MIT but opted instead for political science. Still, he lauded the role of science and technology in modern society. He attributed America’s ultimate dominance in the Cold War to the nation’s technological and scientific superiority.
“I think it could be argued correctly that it was science and technology that eventually forced the Soviet Union to face up to the failure of its own system,” he said. Pointing to technology’s role in the current war against terrorism, Wolfowitz said that it “allowed us to win two brilliant military victories, first in Afghanistan and then in Iraq.”
While it’s great that the leadership of the Pentagon recognizes the important contribution S&T makes to DOD’s mission, it’s equally important that they recognize that the technologies they’re relying upon now are the result of investments made in basic research 15, 20, even 30 years ago (or more). And it’s crucial that they recognize that DOD is moving away from those sorts of long-term investments, emphasizing instead nearer-term development projects. You can see this trend by looking at this chart showing the actual dollars of defense spending for basic research, applied research, and advanced technology development (“6.1,” “6.2”, and “6.3” research in Defense parlance, respectively). Enlarge
What the chart shows is that while advanced technology development (the “D” in “R&D”) funding has more than doubled over the 20 year period from 1984-2004, basic research (the “R” in “R&D”) has remained essentially flat.
This funding profile isn’t sustainable if we hope to continue to fuel the innovation that drives the technology that in turn gives us the advantages we enjoy over our adversaries today.
(For a bit more background on problems with DOD’s approach to basic research, and particularly IT-related research, check this post detailing DARPA’s role in cybersecurity research. CRA also spelled out these problems in a bit more detail in our testimony (pdf) before PITAC’s cybersecurity subcommittee in July.)
So this year many states are switching to electronic voting machines, which use computer technology — the same reliable, foolproof technology we use in the newspaper industry to wwr _)(%$@!@hkjhou((*7**%$ ERROR ERROR DELETING EVERYTHING FROM DAWN OF TIME
Whoops! It turns out that things CAN go wrong with computer technology. One big concern is that electronic voting machines could be tampered with by ”hackers,” as was the case recently when an 11-year-old New Jersey boy named Jason Feeblehonker, using only his GameBoy, was able to get himself elected governor of both North Carolina and Wisconsin. (He’s actually doing a decent job, although some state police officers are not thrilled about having to carry light sabers.)
The Senate Appropriations Committee next week will apparently move their version of the VA-HUD-Independent Agencies appropriations bill that includes funding for the National Science Foundation and NASA. I’ve been told from a couple of different sources that NSF will fare better in the Senate bill than it did in the House version of the bill — which called for a cut of 2.0 percent to the agency’s budget in FY 2005 — but I don’t have any specific numbers.
CRA joined with a number of different scientific societies to urge the Senate to reject the funding levels contained in the House bill, so it’s good to see that some of that pressure might have paid off. But we’ll wait and see what the actual bill contains.
In the meantime, you’ve still got a chance to urge your Senators to reject the proposed cuts to NSF. CRA’s Computing Research Advocacy Network (CRAN) has been very active in this effort and has an informative page with background on the issue, contact information for your Senators and Representative, as well as a sample letter you can use to make the case for computing research. The response so far has been fantastic, but in this case, more is definitely better. So if you haven’t already, please take a look at the site. And consider joining CRAN!
The New York Times has an interesting article today that discusses a forthcoming paper by Nobel Prize-winning economist Paul A. Samuelson that challenges the orthodoxy surrounding outsourcing.
In the piece, Samuelson argues against the “assumption that the laws of economics dictate that the American economy will benefit in the long run from all forms of international trade, including the outsourcing abroad of call-center and software programming jobs.”
Sure, Mr. Samuelson writes, the mainstream economists acknowledge that some people will gain and others will suffer in the short term, but they quickly add that “the gains of the American winners are big enough to more than compensate for the losers.”
That assumption, so widely shared by economists, is “only an innuendo,” Mr. Samuelson writes. “For it is dead wrong about necessary surplus of winnings over losings.”
Trade, in other words, may not always work to the advantage of the American economy, according to Mr. Samuelson.
Jagdish N. Bhagwati, a leading economist and professor at Columbia University — and former student of Samuelson — doesn’t disagree with Samuelson’s theory, only how well it applies broadly to the economy, he told the Times.
The magnified concern, Mr. Bhagwati said, is that China will take away most of American manufacturing and India will take away the high-technology services business. Looking at the small number of jobs actually sent abroad, and based on his own knowledge of developing nations, he concludes that outsourcing worries are greatly exaggerated.
Bhagwati mocks the idea that, because of the Internet, “as many as 300 million well-educated workers, mostly from India and China, could now enter the global work force and compete with Americans for skilled jobs.”
“You have a lot of people, but that doesn’t mean they are qualified. That sort of thinking is really generalizing based on the kind of Indian and Chinese people who manage to make it to Silicon Valley.”
The Samuelson model, Mr. Bhagwati said, yields net economic losses only when foreign nations are closing the innovation gap with the United States.
“But we can change the terms of trade by moving up the technology ladder,” he said. “The U.S. is a reasonably flexible, dynamic, innovative society. That’s why I’m optimistic.”
The policy implications, he added, include increased investment in science, research and education.
First Senate NSF Appropriations Numbers
/In: Funding /by Peter HarshaEarly word out of yesterday’s Senate Appropriations Committee markup is that NSF ended up with a 3 percent increase over FY 2004, matching the President’s budget request. That’s $5.75 billion for FY 05, $169 million over FY 2004, and significantly better than the House’s 2 percent cut to NSF’s overall budget.
Still, we’re a long way from the 15 percent increases authorized by Congress and signed by the President in December 2002 in the NSF Authorization. Given inflation, that 3 percent increase won’t mean many new opportunities for the agency.
More details about specific programs as I get them.
Update: Here’s the breakout:
(in millions)
Level
Budget Request
House Mark
Senate Mark
FY 05 Senate vs. FY 04
FY 05 Senate vs. FY 04
Another Update: Here’s the directorate by directorate breakout:
(in millions)
(est)
Request
Senate Mark
FY 05 Senate vs. FY 04
FY 05 Senate vs. FY 04
Final Update: So, it appears computing did a little better than average in the Senate mark. Only SBE and “Integrative Activities” had higher levels of increase vs. FY 2004 than CISE, and they have considerably smaller baselines. CISE benefited in part from an increase to the Information Technology Research (ITR) line vs. the President’s budget request. The program had been slated to decrease to $178 million for FY 05, but was bumped up to $190 million in the Senate mark. The remainder of the increase is apparently spread throughout the core research programs in CISE.
Here are some snippets relevant to computing research from the Committee Report:
I think a part of the credit for IT R&D remaining a priority within this appropriation has to go to all those who participated in CRA’s CRAN activity to urge members of the Senate to recognize the critical role NSF plays in leading the federal IT R&D effort, and how critical that effort, in turn, is to the future of innovation in this country.
But there’s still more to be done. Neither the House nor the Senate bills have yet come before their respective bodies — and it’s likely neither will before the election. What is likely is that the bills will get bundled together as part of an omnibus appropriations bill that contains all of the unfinished FY 2005 appropriations bills (currently numbering 12) and passed en masse. How the discrepancies between the cuts in the House bill and the more generous Senate bill get resolved is still an open question. If you haven’t yet contacted your Senators and House Member, there’s still time!
Fixing a Busted IT Research System
/In: Policy /by Peter HarshaCRA Chair Jim Foley sat for an extended interview with CNET News.com on the state of the IT research enterprise in the US. Here’s the intro:
Read the whole interview here.
Congress Should Slow Down on New Copyright Regs, USACM Says
/In: Policy /by Peter HarshaThe U.S. Public Policy Committee of ACM — one of CRA’s affiliate organizations — has joined a broad coalition of groups who have written (pdf) to the members of the US Senate urging them to “slow down” their efforts to pass legislation (called INDUCE) that would create a new form of secondary liability for copyright infringement. The Senate Judiciary Committee is poised to act on recommended language prepared by the U.S. Copyright Office that would hold technology makers and service providers liable for copyright violations by end users even if they never knew, contemplated, or intended to facilitate user infringement.
In an earlier letter to the Senate Judiciary Committee, USACM rightly cautioned “that the legislation’s flawed approach of restricting technology rather than focusing on individual acts of infringement could have serious unintended consequences which could undermine continued innovations in software and digital computing and introduce new liabilities for technology developers.”
In the latest letter, the coalition — which includes Google, Yahoo!, Public Knowledge, Intel, IEEE-USA, Sun Microsystems, Consumer Electronics Association, Verizon, Radio Shack, Earthlink, the Association of American Universities, Texas Instruments, and the National Venture Capital Association — raises concerns about the Copyright Office recommendations:
You can read the whole thing here (pdf). The USACM has a bit more background, including the previous letter, on their home page. And the Electronic Frontier Foundation has more detail here.
Appropriations Update: Defense, NSF, NIST, Homeland Security
/In: Funding /by Peter HarshaAs the federal government approaches the end of the 2004 fiscal year (on September 30, 2004), Congress has, to date, completed only one of the 13 annual appropriations bills necessary to fund the operations of government. They have, however, made some progress on others, including some actions that impact computing researchers. Here’s an update on where we stand:
Defense (P.L. 108-287): The FY 2005 Defense Appropriation has the distinction of being the only appropriations bill that has been signed into law (P.L. 108-287). Researchers fared reasonably well under the bill. Aggregate basic research funding at the Department of Defense (DOD), so-called “6.1” research in DOD parlance, will rise to $1.5 billion in FY 2005, an increase of 7.8 percent or $110 million over the FY 2004 appropriated level. DOD applied research (“6.2”), will increase 11.9 percent to $4.9 billion, and advanced technology development (“6.3”) will rise 9.8 percent to $6.2 billion in FY 2005. All together, the Defense science and technology account (6.1, 6.2, and 6.3 research and development) will increase 10.3 percent or $1.2 billion, to $13.3 billion overall in FY 2005.
Of particular importance to computing researchers, the Defense-wide “Computing Systems and Communications Technology” program line which includes much of the funding for IT R&D at DOD and DARPA has been split into two program lines. The new “Information and Communications Technology” line will receive $192.7 million in funding in FY 2005, and the new “Cognitive Computing Systems” account will receive $151.2 million in FY 2005. Their combined $344 million represents about $1.2 million more than the President requested for FY 2005, and $5.5 million more than FY 2004.
Also the “High Performance Computing Modernization Program” received an increase of $32.7 million or 15.9 percent over FY 2004, increasing to $238 million for FY 2005.
Full details on the branch-by-branch funding breakouts are included in a table after the jump.
Additional Link: The final conference report.
VA-HUD-Independent Agencies (HR 5041): The VA-HUD bill includes funding for the National Science Foundation and NASA. So far, the only action taken on the VA-HUD bill has been a markup of the House version of the bill in the House Appropriations Committee. As we’ve covered previously, the House Appropriations committee bill would cut NSF’s overall budget by 2.0 percent — about $73 million — from FY 2004, a level $194 million below the President’s requested level and well below the 15 percent per year increase authorized by Congress and approved by the President in 2002. The bill achieves the cuts by stopping three programs planned for starts in FY 2005 — the 21st Workforce Initiative, a new class of Science and Technology Centers, and a proposed Innovation Fund — and by calling for $18.7 million of cuts out of unspecified current programs.
The situation is potentially more dire given that a large cut to NASA’s budget in the bill ($1.1 billion below the President’s requested level) has led to a veto threat from the Administration and angry words from Rep. Tom Delay, an influential member of the House Republican leadership who now represents large portions of the NASA Houston workforce. Mitigating those cuts enough to enable Delay and the Administration to sign off on the bill may require finding funding elsewhere in the bill to cover NASA’s shortfall, so NSF may find its budget once again under the knife.
The situation may be somewhat better in the Senate VA-HUD bill. Though the Senate has not yet marked up the bill, it has been suggested that some creative bookkeeping (namely, declaring spending for the Veterans’ Administration in the bill “emergency spending” related to the war effort) might free some additional money from the budget cap. While there’s no guarantee NSF would see any of that additional funding in the bill, the agency is expected to fare better. At this point, however, no numbers are available.
CRA has joined with many other scientific societies to urge members of Congress to reject the proposed cuts in the VA-HUD bill, but there’s still time for you to help as well. CRA’s Computing Research Advocacy Network has been very active in contacting members of the Senate and House in support of NSF funding. In order to get involved, see CRAN’s Advocacy Alert page, with a complete background on the issue, sample letters, and contact information for your representatives in Congress.
Commerce, Justice, State (CJS) (HR 4754, S. 2809): Includes funding for the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA). We’ve detailed the dire funding situation faced by NIST at the start of the 2004 fiscal year. A $22 million cut to the agency’s budget in the FY 2004 appropriation left it unable to move forward on much of its cyber security work and led to layoffs of some lab personnel.
Both the House and Senate have marked up their FY 2005 CJS appropriations bills. The Senate bill would funnel more funding to the NIST Labs than the House version, adding $43 million to the FY 2004 number for a total of $384 million for FY 2005. In contrast, the House version would provide $375 million for FY 2005. Both versions are still well short of the Administration’s request of $423 million.
However, the Senate took a completely different path than the House regarding the controversial Advanced Technology Program. The House bill and the President’s budget request both zeroed out the $177 million ATP program, but the Senate version would actually increase the program by 14.5 percent to $203 million. It’s not clear how this significant divergence of opinion will get resolved.
Of note to computing researchers, the Senate bill would set aside $3 million for quantum computing research, with the committee noting that a breakthrough in quantum computing technology would rival that of the transistor 50 years ago.
Homeland Security (HR 4567, S. 2537): Both the House and Senate have marked up their respective versions of the Homeland Security bill; both have the same relatively small investment of $18 million in cyber security research and development for FY 2005 out of a total Homeland Security S&T budget of over $1.0 billion.
Outlook: As noted previously, it’s likely most of the work on the outstanding appropriations bills won’t move forward until after the election, when Congress returns in lame duck session. Until then, the federal government will operate under a “continuing resolution,” which will fund all government agencies at current funding levels and freeze any new starts until the remaining bills are passed. The odds are also pretty good that Congress will elect not to do anything during the lame duck session and instead punt to the new Congress in January. About the only factor opposing that is that both Appropriations chairman will have to relinquish their posts in the new Congress (due to committee term limits), so both would rather deal with the issues during their term, rather than after.
On the other hand, continuing resolutions are very appealing to fiscal conservatives in the Congress because it forces federal agencies to freeze new spending for the duration of the resolution.
In any case, don’t expect much to get settled until after the election.
More details as they emerge….
Read more →
Senate Committee Passes Supercomputing Authorization
/In: Funding /by Peter HarshaThe Senate Committee on Energy and Natural Resources passed a modified version of a House bill that would authorize the Secretary of Energy to develop a “leadership class” supercomputer and establish a “High-end Software Development Center.”
The bill, HR 4516, is a melding of the House version of HR 4516, introduced by Reps. Judy Biggert (R-IL) and Lincoln Davis (D-TN) and Senate bill S. 2176, introduced by Sens. Lamar Alexander (R-TN) and Jeff Bingaman (D-NM). Both bills are loosely based on the recommendations from the High End Computing Revitalization Task Force Workshop CRA hosted in June, 2003. (We’ve covered both bills here recently.)
The compromise bill adopts the House’s less prescriptive (and lower) authorized funding amounts ($50 million in FY 05, $55 million in FY 06, $60 million in FY 07), but adds the software development center from the Senate bill and strips language added at the insistence of Rep. Brad Sherman that would have required a study on the implications of artificial intelligence research.
Next stop for the compromise bill is reconsideration by both the House and Senate. The modifications to the bill should help ensure quick passage in both chambers.
Rumor Mill Buzzing About New NSF Director
/In: People /by Peter HarshaThe DC rumor mill (well, the science community subset) is buzzing about an Administration announcement tomorrow of a new NSF Director nominee to replace Acting Director Arden Bement. Bement has been “Acting” director since Rita Colwell resigned the post in February, but current law apparently precludes anyone from serving as an “Acting” director for more than 210 days (a term that would on Sept 19th). The rumor suggests that the Administration will name someone other than Bement to take the position, but it’s a toss-up as to who that will be.
More details as they emerge….
Update (12:30, 9/15/04): Looks like it’s Bement. No official announcement yet, though.
Another Update: Here’s the e-mail Bement sent NSF employees today:
Wolfowitz Praises Defense S&T
/In: Funding /by Peter HarshaTech Daily’s William New and Sarah Lai Stirland have a piece today (sub. req’d) on the White House’s 2003 Presidential Early Career Awards for Scientists and Engineers in which Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz praised the role of science and technology in America’s victory in the Cold War.
While it’s great that the leadership of the Pentagon recognizes the important contribution S&T makes to DOD’s mission, it’s equally important that they recognize that the technologies they’re relying upon now are the result of investments made in basic research 15, 20, even 30 years ago (or more). And it’s crucial that they recognize that DOD is moving away from those sorts of long-term investments, emphasizing instead nearer-term development projects. You can see this trend by looking at this chart showing the actual dollars of defense spending for basic research, applied research, and advanced technology development (“6.1,” “6.2”, and “6.3” research in Defense parlance, respectively).
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What the chart shows is that while advanced technology development (the “D” in “R&D”) funding has more than doubled over the 20 year period from 1984-2004, basic research (the “R” in “R&D”) has remained essentially flat.
This funding profile isn’t sustainable if we hope to continue to fuel the innovation that drives the technology that in turn gives us the advantages we enjoy over our adversaries today.
(For a bit more background on problems with DOD’s approach to basic research, and particularly IT-related research, check this post detailing DARPA’s role in cybersecurity research. CRA also spelled out these problems in a bit more detail in our testimony (pdf) before PITAC’s cybersecurity subcommittee in July.)
Amusing Diversion: E-voting
/In: Misc. /by Peter HarshaDave Barry on electronic voting: Low-carb leader will get my vote.
Here’s a bit:
Read the whole thing (via the Miami Herald).
NSF Funding Rumors
/In: Funding /by Peter HarshaThe Senate Appropriations Committee next week will apparently move their version of the VA-HUD-Independent Agencies appropriations bill that includes funding for the National Science Foundation and NASA. I’ve been told from a couple of different sources that NSF will fare better in the Senate bill than it did in the House version of the bill — which called for a cut of 2.0 percent to the agency’s budget in FY 2005 — but I don’t have any specific numbers.
CRA joined with a number of different scientific societies to urge the Senate to reject the funding levels contained in the House bill, so it’s good to see that some of that pressure might have paid off. But we’ll wait and see what the actual bill contains.
In the meantime, you’ve still got a chance to urge your Senators to reject the proposed cuts to NSF. CRA’s Computing Research Advocacy Network (CRAN) has been very active in this effort and has an informative page with background on the issue, contact information for your Senators and Representative, as well as a sample letter you can use to make the case for computing research. The response so far has been fantastic, but in this case, more is definitely better. So if you haven’t already, please take a look at the site. And consider joining CRAN!
Economists Tussle Over Outsourcing, But Investment in Research Funding Seen as Answer
/In: People /by Peter HarshaThe New York Times has an interesting article today that discusses a forthcoming paper by Nobel Prize-winning economist Paul A. Samuelson that challenges the orthodoxy surrounding outsourcing.
In the piece, Samuelson argues against the “assumption that the laws of economics dictate that the American economy will benefit in the long run from all forms of international trade, including the outsourcing abroad of call-center and software programming jobs.”
Jagdish N. Bhagwati, a leading economist and professor at Columbia University — and former student of Samuelson — doesn’t disagree with Samuelson’s theory, only how well it applies broadly to the economy, he told the Times.
Bhagwati mocks the idea that, because of the Internet, “as many as 300 million well-educated workers, mostly from India and China, could now enter the global work force and compete with Americans for skilled jobs.”
Read the whole thing here.