Computing Research Policy Blog

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: House Science Committee


House Science Committee Releases Views & Estimates for FY 2018; Prioritizes Computing at Expense of SBE Again


Last Friday, the House Science, Space, and Technology Committee’s Chairman Lamar Smith (R-TX) sent the committee’s Views and Estimates (V&Es) for the coming fiscal year to the House Budget Committee. This is required by law and is meant to give the Congressional authorizing committees, the ones who set policy, rather than direct funding, a chance to state their goals for the Federal departments and agencies that are under their jurisdiction. This year, once again, the Science Committee is prioritizing computing at the National Science Foundation (NSF), Department of Energy (DOE), and the National Institute of Standards & Technology (NIST), while de-prioritizing research at the Social, Behavioral, & Economic (SBE) sciences and Geosciences (GEO) directorates within NSF and biological and environmental research at DOE.

House Science Committee Reviews Federal IT Research


Experts from academia and government, including CCC Council Chair Greg Hager, told a congressional panel yesterday that the Networking and Information Technology Research and Development (NITRD) program remains a crucial part of the extraordinarily productive computing research ecosystem that has made the U.S. the world leader in IT and deserves further support.

“If we want to out compete, we have to out compute,” witnesses tell Congressional Science Committee


On Wednesday January 28th, the Energy Subcommittee of the House Science, Space, and Technology Committee held a hearing on, “Supercomputing and American Technology Leadership.” The witnesses that were called, who spanned the public and private sectors in high performance computing (HPC), gave the simple message that in order to out compete other nations, America needs […]

Sustained investment in research is needed to combat cyber threats, CISE AD tells Congress


On Tuesday January 27th, the Research and Technology Subcommittee of the House Science, Space, & Technology Committee held it’s first hearing of the 114th Congress. The topic was expanding cyber threats and cybersecurity, and the subcommittee heard from experts from both the private sector and government agencies. Assistant Director of CISE, Jim Kurose, testifying for […]

Computing Community Weighs in on “Truthy” Controversy


Five leading computing societies and associations today released a letter they’ve jointly sent to House Committee on Science, Space, and Technology Chairman Lamar Smith (R-TX) and committee Ranking Member Eddie Bernice Johnson (D-TX) expressing their concern over mischaracterizations of research on information diffusion in online social networks at Indiana University. The work has come under fire […]

STEM Education Bill Introduced in the House


Today the chairman of the House Science Committee introduced H.R. 5031, the “STEM Education Act of 2014’”, to promote STEM education at NSF. The computer science community is a direct beneficiary: the first item in the bill would require federal agencies to include computer science in their definition of STEM. You’ll recall Science Committee Chair […]

A Fruitless Markup on Department of Energy R&D Act of 2014


[Editor’s Note: This post marks the debut of CRA’s new Tisdale Policy Fellow for Summer 2014, Yiyang Shen. Yiyang is a sophomore at NYU, with an interest in Mathematics and Computer Science, and will spend this summer with CRA working on science policy issues, including tracking the progress of efforts to reauthorize the Department of […]

FIRST Act Marked Up By the Full House Science Committee


On May 22nd the House Science Committee took up the Frontiers in Innovation, Research, Science, and Technology (or FIRST) Act of 2014. The bill’s lead sponsor is the House Science Committee chairman, Lamar Smith (R-TX). This bill is to reauthorize the majority of the America COMPETES Act of 2010, and focuses on the non-energy agencies […]