The Computing Research Association (or CRA) has been involved in shaping public policy of relevance to computing research for more than two decades. More recently the CRA Government Affairs program has enhanced its efforts to help the members of the computing research community contribute to the public debate knowledgeably and effectively.
Tag Archive: Department of Energy
Last week, the full House of Representatives passed the National Science Foundation for the Future Act (H.R. 2225) and the DOE Science for the Future Act (H.R. 3593). Both bills passed by wide, bipartisan margins; the NSF bill passed on a 345-67 vote, while the DOE SC bill passed by 351-68. The bills now head into a conference process with the Senate’s United States Innovation and Competition Act of 2021.
Last week, the full House Science, Space, and Technology Committee considered their NSF for the Future Act (H.R. 2225) and the recently introduced DOE Science for the Future Act (H.R. 3593). In another departure from their counterparts in the Senate, the committee marked-up both bills in a bipartisan environment with each amendment being approved on unanimous voice-votes. Both pieces of legislation were likewise approved on a bipartisan basis, with no votes in opposition.
UPDATE (12/28/20): After threatening a veto, and risking a government shutdown, Trump signed the budget into law Sunday night. Fiscal Year 2021 is complete. Original Post: When last we left the Fiscal Year 2021 (FY21) budget process, we were waiting for Congress to get the final bill across the finish line. It took them two […]
When last we left the Fiscal Year 2021 (FY21) budget process, we were worried about a potentially stalled continuing resolution at the end of September. Luckily, no one wanted to shut down the government just before the November Election; a CR was passed and signed into law. The CR created a new deadline to get a permanent budget into place, which is December 11th. Now with the election behind us, and hoping to jumpstart the process, yesterday the Senate Appropriations Committee released its slate of appropriations bills. Let’s get into the details.
Just in time for the calendar year 2020, and almost three months after the Fiscal Year 2020 (FY20) began, Congress is finally finishing up its work on the Federal budget with two Minibuses of all the appropriations legislation. For the research community, it’s mostly good news but there are a few clouds in the sky: the National Science Foundation will see very modest increases under the bill, and the defense research accounts are essentially flat-funded.
In June, the House of Representatives passed their version of the Fiscal Year 2020 (FY20) Energy and Water appropriations bill, including increases for some key computing programs at Department of Energy. This bill contains the budgets for the Department of Energy’s Office of Science (DOE SC) and ARPA-E, as well as funding for the Exascale Computing R&D program, for which DOE is the lead federal agency. While the increases are probably positive news for the computing research community, uncertainty about overall Federal spending levels likely puts these specific appropriations levels in doubt. Nevertheless, the bills at least send a signal about the areas House Democrats see as priorities for the Federal government in FY20.
It’s been a busy September from a Congressional appropriations perspective. As of this writing, nine of the twelve appropriations bills have passed, including the Defense, Energy and Water, and Labor-Health and Human Services (HHS) bills – a productive pace not seen from Congress in many years. While it’s good these were passed into law, and they do cover some important research agencies, left unfinished is one key bill of concern to the computing research community — the Commerce, Justice, Science (CJS) appropriations bill, which includes funding for NSF, NIST, NOAA and NASA; more on that in a moment. Until then, here are the details of the pieces of legislative that have passed.
[Editor’s Note: This post was written by CRA’s new Tisdale Policy Fellow for Summer 2018, Amita Shukla.] Continuing CRA’s tracking of the Fiscal Year 2019 (FY19) appropriations process, we pick up with coverage of the Energy and Water Appropriations bills. This is the annual appropriations bill that funds the Department of Energy (DOE) and all […]
Last month, President Trump released his budget request for Fiscal Year 2019. As we have done in years past, the CRA Policy Blog will be doing a series of posts on the assorted agency budgets that are important to the computing research community. In this post we highlight the Department of Energy (DOE).
On Tuesday, the House of Representatives passed H.R. 589, the Department of Energy Research and Innovation Act. Predominantly a policy bill for DOE, the Act provides direction for the Department on, “basic science research, nuclear energy research and development (R&D), research coordination and priorities, and reforms to streamline national lab management.”
