The Future of the Materials Initiative, National Laboratories, and Technology Policy
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reconstitute the FCCSET so that its members now consist of secretaries or deputy secretaries from all the relevant agencies, as well as heads of independent agencies like EPA, NSF, and NASA.
I have been urging societies to become much more involved in the political side of the equation. FCCSET now has seven umbrella committees operating under its aegis. Among the most noteworthy activities of these committees the past year have been five crosscut activities. FCCSET organized interagency groups to look at the programs of anywhere from a dozen to 20 different agencies in a particular area and to ask whether these agency programs really constitute a coherent national program in that particular area of science and technology. In the past they have not. I have been delighted with the unprecedented level of cooperation these past few years under the new FCCSET mantle, where agencies have actually recast large parts of their programs to fit more effectively into an overall coherent national program. Each year, so far, the President has accepted the results of these crosscut studies as special initiatives in his budget transmission to Congress. I have no reason to believe that isn't going to happen this year as well. This year we have given this kind of treatment to
global change research, mathematics and science education, high-performance computing and communications, advanced materials and processing, and biotechnology. It's my strong expectation that next year we will add advanced manufacturing to that list. The Council is considering a new category of research programs—a national research program where the emphasis will be more on evaluation than on expansion but where we will still maintain the coherence that is essential to get the maximum result for every dollar that Congress can make available in that particular area. I have been extraordinarily pleased with the way the FCCSET structure has functioned. It has established a new level of cooperation among the agencies in programmatic and budgetary areas, and it does other things as well. For example, an ad hoc group under the FCCSET is addressing risk assessment. Risk assessment is playing an increasingly important role in all agencies, but in the past agencies have used different assumptions and principles to guide their activities in these areas. We are not searching for a manual on how to do risk assessment and management, but rather for a consensus on a common set of principles and assumptions that would underlie the risk assessment and management work in all the federal agencies. We're making good progress toward that goal. FCCSET is looking at another area that has nothing to do with budgets—the development of a standard structure for agreements that the U.S. government might enter into with governments of other countries. Because we are developing an increasing number of bilateral and multilateral cooperative agreements in science and technology, it's important that we agree on a standard we can all use instead of reinventing the whole agreement on each
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