COMPUTING RESEARCH POLICY BLOG

The Berkeleyan, a publication of UC Berkeley, has a great, in-depth piece on a trend we’ve noted and complained about in this space quite often: the increasing use of restrictions on federally supported fundamental research and its impact on university-based research. I’ll just cite a little bit, but I urge you to read the article.

DARPA, explains Lee’s colleague David Culler, “is a very strange place these days.” Just months after Lee’s brush with export controls, Culler, also an EECS professor, had a similar experience. In 2000 he was awarded an agency contract to develop hardware and software for miniaturized wireless computer networks, utilizing open-source software that would be shared with the wider research community. “This whole notion of openness was fundamental,” Culler says. “That’s what we wanted to do.”
In February 2004, however, DARPA’s program manager sent an e-mail to Culler and more than a dozen other researchers working on various aspects of the program, asking that source codes and possibly other material — the message, says Culler, was “ambiguous” — be removed from websites. Unsure of what to do, Culler consulted with Freedman’s office, which advised him to take no such action.
DARPA, meanwhile, pondered its next steps, eventually opting to split the program into two major segments, with basic research remaining at universities and classified work going to military contractors like Northrup Grumman. The decision, Culler says, wound up costing Berkeley “very little,” though other universities lost “quite a lot.”
“The money basically moved from the universities to the military contractors,” he says. “It’s a tremendous shift in where the resources have gone.”
More is at stake than just money, however. Ironically, DARPA’s efforts to “short-circuit” the research process — to short-shrift basic research in favor of specific military applications — could have the effect of hampering, not improving, America’s security.
“If you’re not able to keep the basic-research engine alive,” Culler explains, the result is likely to be less innovation and competitiveness, as other countries pick up the slack. “There is absolutely a need for basic research,” he insists. “Ultimately, in the long term, that contributes to an advantage in national security.”

Thanks to Spaf for the tip.

House Appropriations Chair Jerry Lewis (R-CA) is apparently proposing the most radical restructuring of the Appropriations Committee in decades, according to an article appearing in today’s Congress Daily (sub. req’d). Peter Cohn, writes (sorry, I can’t find it online), that the proposal would pare the 13 appropriations committees down to 10 and would move NASA and the National Science Foundation out from beneath the veterans’ programs and housing programs in the VA-HUD appropriations and into the Energy and Water Appropriations, where they would join the Corps of Engineers and the Department of Energy.
The proposal is very similar to the appropriations reorganization originally floated by House Majority Leader Tom Delay (R-TX) (which we covered here). The proposal doesn’t quite create the “Science Subcommittee” that was rumored to have been part of Delay’s original proposal — the National Institutes of Health, along with the National Institute of Standards and Technology and National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration won’t be affected by the move. But it’s more ambitious than most predicted.
I think this could potentially raise the prominence of NASA and NSF within the approps process, as they’ll be sharing a subcommittee with agencies with more modest budgets (Corps of Engineers = ~$4.8 billion; DOE = ~$23 billion) than the two behemoths in VA-HUD (VA = ~$65 billion and HUD = ~$38 billion). One potential negative, however, is that the Energy and Water bill tends to be a magnet for congressional earmarks — typically for water projects within home districts.
The plan faces some resistance from Senate Appropriations Chair Thad Cochran (R-MS), who told Congress Daily that he’s “in no rush to make major changes.” One Senator who will surely object to any move to eliminate the VA-HUD subcommittee is Kit Bond (R-MO), who is slated to return as its chairman.
The House leadership apparently plans to go ahead with the change regardless of what the Senate decides. Should the Senate not go along with the move, reconciliation of the bills in conference could be chaotic.
In any case, expect that whatever reorganization will happen will happen soon. As always, keep it tuned here for the latest details….
Update: It appears Rep. David Hobson (R-OH) would be in line to take over the newly constituted Energy and Water subcommittee (with NSF and NASA)….