COMPUTING RESEARCH POLICY BLOG

The House and Senate just reached agreement on the FY 06 Commerce, Justice, Science Appropriations bill and it appears NSF will receive just over a 3 percent bump over FY 05. Details are a bit scant at the moment, but it appears NSF will receive $5.65 billion in FY 06 — that’s $10 million more than the House approved in its version of the bill, $50 million over the President’s request, and $120 million over the Senate number.
There are still a couple of unknowns at the moment — whether the agreement means CJS is safe from across-the-board cuts that are still possible, and the disposition of a transfer of Coast Guard ships to NSF that could effect the overall NSF number — but NSF is in a much better situation at the moment than most of us thought was possible at this point.
More details as they emerge….
Update (4:20 pm, 11/4): Here are some of the specific numbers (compare to this chart for previously approved House and Senate levels):
NSF Overall – $5,653.27 million. That’s 3.3 percent above FY05 and nearly one percent about the President’s request.
Research and Related Activities: $4,387.52 million. That’s 4 percent above FY05 and 1.2 percent above the President’s request.
Major Research Equipment and Facilities Construction: $193.35 million. Equal to the House and Senate versions.
Education and Human Resources: $807 million. That’s equal to the House number, 9.5 percent higher than the President’s request, and includes $4 million above the President’s request for the Math and Science Partnership.
Salaries and Expenses: $250 million. 12 percent above FY05 but 7 percent below the President’s request.
Office of the Inspector General: $11.5 million
National Science Board: $4 million
An across-the-board cut still looms. The Conference appears to have exceeded its spending target for the bill, so there will likely be some across-the-board cut to repair the problem before the bill is actually filed on Monday. According to NSF, appropriations staff indicate that the cut would amount to no more than 0.3 percent at this point (which would mean NSF would lose approximately $17 million of the funding gained above), leaving them with about a 3 percent gain overall.
Even with the possibility of a 0.3 percent across the board cut, NSF fared very well — exceeding even the high mark originally laid down by the House Appropriations committee last May. Credit for this improvement in fortune has to go to the coalitions and individuals who have advocated strongly for better support for basic science even in the face of an ugly, ugly budget environment. And, of course, thanks are also owed to those members of Congress who worked hard to achieve any increase for NSF in the face of enormous pressures to cut discretionary spending. In the coming weeks we’ll single out quite a few of those members, but right off the top it’s worth passing along our thanks to Rep. Frank Wolf (R-VA), Rep. Alan Mollohan (D-WV), Sen. Richard Shelby (R-AL), and Sen. Barbara Mikulski (D-MD) who are the Chairs and Ranking Members of the House and Senate appropriations subcommittees with jurisdiction over NSF.

As I noted in the last post, the Senate Appropriations Committee included language in the Senate verision of the FY 06 Defense Appropriations bill that would strip $55 million from an element of DARPA’s Cognitive Computing program — a move that seems to run counter to recent congressional sentiment on the role of computer science, especially university-led fundamental computer science, at DARPA. The “out of the blue” cut — there was no advance warning provided by appropriations staffers, no evidence that there was dissatisfaction with the program — would fall on the “Learning, Reasoning, and Integrated Cognitive Systems (pdf)” (COG-2) account. With little feedback from the Senate appropriators, we’re operating under the assumption that the main impetus for the cut was to provide an offset for increases elsewhere in the bill, though there’s been some speculation among Senate staff that the program may have suffered do to a misperception that it’s somehow similar to some of the agency’s more controversial bio-related programs.
It’s not. As we’ve tried to point out to the conferees who will have to determine whether the cut will stand in the compromise bill negotiated with the House (the House opted to fund the program at the agency’s requested level), research in learning, reasoning, and cognitive systems is focused on intelligent intrepretations of signals and data, on controlling unmanned vehicles, and on amplifying human effectiveness. Its aim is to reduce U.S. casualties by providing improved command and control and tactical planning against adversaries, as well as improved training systems. Work in this area includes research responsible for the Command Post of the Future (CPOF) — a software system currently deployed and very widely-used in Iraq to coordinate battle plans and integrate multiple intelligence reports, providing U.S. forces the capability to plan, execute and replan much faster than the enemy’s decision cycle and cited by Secretary Rumsfeld as the major contributor to victory in the first phase of Operation Iraqi Freedom. It’s also cricital to the research and development of autonomous, unmanned vehicles that amplify our warfighting capability while reducing the number of U.S. forces in harm’s way. Cutting support so significantly for this research will hamper advancements in defense-related IT in the short- and long-term and will slow technological advancements essential to current and future military operations in Iraq and around the globe.
It also runs completely counter to recent concerns of Congress, PITAC and the DOD’s Defense Science Board. All three bodies have raised strong concerns about the shift of DARPA resources away from fundamental research at universities, especially in information technology. The Cognitive Computing program is one area where DARPA has responded positively to these concerns.
Because these “out of the blue” cuts are so difficult to counter — they appear very late in the process with very little information about what motivated them and at a time when access to appropriations staff is most limited — we’ve focused our strategy opposing the cut by urging the members of the conference committee to abandon the Senate number and adopt the President’s budget request, the number approved by the House. You can help. We’ll tell you how soon….