Washington News
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Keeping Tabs on U.S. Policymakers An invisible boundary seems to separate those who participate in Washington politics and policy and those who don't. Step across that boundary and one enters what can seem like an ephemeral world of committees, subcommittees, and working groups. Just as one begins to make sense of it all, a new Administration or a shift in Congress throws it in limbo again. So it seems. Actually, names may change and committees may dissolve, but policies can continue to flourish. At least that's how Lyle H. Schwartz, director of materials science and engineering at the National Institute of Standards and Technology in Gaithersburg, Maryland, thinks about materials research policy. During the 1980s, much attention was focused on comparing the United States to Europe and Japan and predicting how the United States would fare in an increasingly competitive global marketplace. It became clear that future technologies, and consequently, future competitiveness, depended in part on advances made in materials. To understand where the United States stood in materials, the National Research Council (NRC) commissioned a major review of materials science and engineering in the mid-1980s. Its final report identified materials synthesis and processing as weak links in U.S. materials research and development. "[Those two areas] covered a broad slice of materials [in general]," said Adriaan DeGraaf of the Division of Materials Research at the National Science Foundation (NSF). The NRC recommendation spurred the Bush administration to propose advanced materials and processing as one of several R&D initiatives for the fiscal year 1992 federal budget. As with earlier so-called crosscutting programs on global change and high performance computing, this proposal put materials high on the federal agenda. "It focused attention on materials in a very positive way," DeGraaf said. "It had a very positive effect on support." Yet even the committee formed as a result of that initiative "was an extension of work going on a long time," Schwartz said. Under Schwartz's leadership, this committee pulled together the first crosscutting analysis of the various activities of U.S. agencies in materials work. For the previous two years, it has issued surveys of federal activity in materials science which included what agencies were doing and with how much money. At the same time, its members had begun to
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identify infrastructure and construction, automotive, aeronautics, and electronics as four key priorities and to set up subcommittees to develop policy for them. However, no one could agree on the proper relationship between government and the private sector. Partisan politics inhibited the setting up of priorities and the planning about what to do next, Schwartz said. The arrival of the Clinton administration remedied that, as now the President and the congressional majority agreed government had a role to play in technology development, Schwartz said. This new President abolished the Federal Coordinating Council for Science, Engi
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