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ALERT re: FY 2001 Appropriations
for the National Science Foundation

Friday, 9 June 2000

To the Computing Research Advocacy Network:

Thanks to all of you who contacted your legislators in response to my earlier alert concerning federal appropriations for information technology research. The process is in full swing and the early returns are not as good as we had hoped. The FY 2001 funding bill approved by the House Appropriations Committee includes a 3.4 percent budget increase for the NSF, just a fraction of the requested increase of 17 percent. While the amount provided for the Computer and Information Science and Engineering directorate is about 13 percent above current-year funding, it's about $90 million below what CISE has requested. The bill would also eliminate funding for the Terascale Computing Systems program.

The action now moves to Senate Appropriations, which will be writing its version of the funding bill in the next two weeks. The Senate committee is generally favorable toward the NSF and the Information Technology Research initiative. However, the funds available for distribution are severely constrained. The committee needs to be assured it has broader support for the NSF budget request from within the Senate.

Recommended Actions

Please contact both of the Senators from your state and urge them to express their support for full funding of the National Science Foundation and its Information Technology Research initiative to the chair and ranking member of the VA-HUD appropriations subcommittee: Senators Christopher Bond (R-MO) and Barbara Mikulski (D-MD).

If you already wrote letters earlier in the process, follow up with phone calls to your Senators' Washington offices. If you don't already have a contact, ask to speak to the legislative assistant for research and technology appropriations. Briefly explain who you are, why you're calling — talking points are provided below — and how important the NSF and its ITR initiative are to the health of your department/center/lab.

Engage your university's or institution's Washington representative and make sure he/she knows about the potential impact of the NSF's ITR program on your department/center/lab.

Please circulate this message to interested colleages, collaborators, and partner institutions; let them know that public advocacy is critical to the future of computing research.

Talking Points

• We urge you to support full funding for the National Science Foundation's FY 2001 budget request, a carefully crafted, balanced plan from the only federal agency whose primary responsibility is for fundamental, merit-reviewed, university-based research. The results of past federal investments in such research are evident in the rapid acceleration of technological innovation by the private sector and in our enjoyment of the longest period of economic growth in U.S. history.

• The NSF's support for fundamental research, education, and infrastructure is especially critical in the area of Information Technology. Advances in IT fuel productivity growth throughout the economy and progress in many fields of importance to the country's future, including health care, national security, education, communications, and public safety. As in other areas of science and engineering, progress in IT is highly dependent on the broad-based, pre-competitive research conducted in university computer science and engineering departments.

• The NSF's Information Technology Research (ITR) initiative represents the heart of federal efforts to expand support for long-term information technology research to meet the needs of the 21st century. A solid, widely supported plan is in place and research priorities have been identified, including scalable networking infrastructure, software, and high performance computing. In the ITR initiative's first year (FY 2000), more than 3,000 ideas for new IT research projects were generated, yet the NSF will have to refuse all but about 160 due to lack of funds.

• Full support ($45 million) for the NSF's Terascale Computing Systems program is also critical as it would enable continued acquisition and development of leading-edge computational infrastructure for use by the academic research community. The huge unmet demand for computing capacity for non-defense research impedes the ability of researchers to attack complex problems in many crucial fields of science and engineering.

Contact Information

Letters to Senators should be addressed:

The Honorable [name]

United States Senate

Washington, DC 20510

You can find your Senators' telephone numbers and links to their websites from:

Senate Contact Information by State

CRA deeply appreciates your involvement in advocacy activities. Please don't hesitate to contact me if you have trouble obtaining any of the information referenced above or if you have any questions or comments. Thanks!

Lisa A. Thompson
Director of Government Affairs
Computing Research Association
1100 17th Street NW, Suite 507
Washington, DC 20036
202-234-2111 / 202-667-1066 fax
thompson@cra.org