Science Policy
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SCIENCE POLICY Incorporating WASHINGTON NEWS and policy news from around the world.
NSF Authorization Act Approved; Moves to Appropriations Just before the U.S. Congress broke for the winter holidays, President George W. Bush signed H.R. 4664, The National Science Foundation (NSF) Authorization Act of 2002—more colloquially known as the NSF doubling bill. The provisions of the 92-page bill set the NSF on track to double its federal funding level by 2007 after suffering from essentially flat budgets since the 1980s. The move came as a welcome surprise to some, since the bill initially met with resistance from the Bush administration, which had requested a 3% increase for NSF earlier this year. Hearings in September helped clarify the contested issues, and the discrepancies between the Senate and House of Representatives versions of the bill were resolved in a compromise bill. The administration and the authorizing committees reached an agreement on compromise language in late November. “I think it bodes well for the future of NSF funding,” said Thomas Weber, director of NSF’s Materials Science Division, of the final version of H.R. 4664. “It signals strong bipartisan support for NSF within Congress, and that’s definitely a good thing.” Increases in authorization levels specified in the bill for each of the next five fiscal years (FYs) range from 13.1% to 15.5%, with specific allocations provided for FY 2003: $704 million for information technology research, $301 million for nanoscale science and engineering, $1006 million for education and human resources, $172 million for major research equipment and instrumentation, and $3.5 million for the National Science Board. John Hunt, acting director for the mathematical and physical sciences at NSF, is particularly heartened by the allocation for nanoscience, in which materials play a critical role. “We have experienced an incredible amount of interest in this topic, with a large number of proposals,” he said. “But the funding rates have been so low that we’ve had to turn down quite a lot of good proposals. Having more funds would enable us to fund more of those, which is extremely important for the economic future of the country.” Weber estimates that his division needs a 30% increase to fund all of the worthwhile proposals it receives, not including the corresponding need to increase individual grant sizes. “There was a time when industrial giants like Bell Labs conducted a lot of basic research; but today, industry is increasingly backing away from funding fundamental science, so it’s very important that the government steps 160
in,” he said. “New materials lead to new technologies, which produce new markets and economic wealth. And 70% of today’s technical jobs are in materials and the physical sciences, yet those budgets have been flat for a very long time.” Among the new provisions in the compromise bill is language stating that sustained increases in funding levels are “contingent on a determination by Congress that the Foundation has made successful progress towa
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