mathematics education; and developing a more robust innovation infrastructure.

The report caught the attention of both the scientific community, which used it as a rallying point to advocate for increased funding, and the policy-making community who saw its clear statements about the threats the country faced if the current trends were not reversed. Policymakers were quick to draft responses to the document. The White House introduced a new presidential initiative called the American Competitiveness Initiative, modeled on some of the key recommendations of the Gathering Storm report, including doubling the research budgets of NSF, NIST, and DOE Office of Science over 10 years. The House Democratic leadership proposed an Innovation Agenda that echoed the report’s recommendations. By mid- 2006, legislation designed to enact the report’s recommendations began to appear. Ultimately, these responses would coalesce into new legislation called the COMPETES Act that garnered unanimous approval in the Senate and overwhelming support in the House.

But this act merely laid out funding goals. Congress and the president still had to fund the various agencies as part of the annual appropriations process. The groundswell of support that was motivated by a clear and compelling rationale provided by the Gathering Storm report and the dozens of reports that had preceded it made it appear that Congress and the president would deliver on these promises. And, for most of the process, that was indeed the case. At every milestone during the FY 2008 funding cycle, the increases for NSF, NIST and DOE Office of Science were at or, in some cases, higher than the levels called for in the COMPETES Act. However, at the 11th hour, politics trumped the goals of the COMPETES Act.

The president and Republicans in Congress decided it was in their interest to constrain spending while Democrats wanted to increase spending for many of their priorities. Because of this fight between the president and the Democratic leadership—a fight the Democrats would ultimately lose because they could not override the president’s veto—all non-defense spending, including all the science funding called for in COMPETES, was rolled into one giant omnibus spend-

it is difficult to
predict what factors
will motivate
specific policy
debates because
the political system
is ever changing.

ing bill. In order to get the funding levels to a level the president would sign, the Democratic leadership had to pick and choose which programs to grant priority and which to abandon. In need of a political victory in the wake of the defeat on the spending level, the Democratic leadership emphasized priorities with which they could draw the sharpest distinctions between their view and the president’s. Unfortunately for the science community, that did not include a priority for science funding (for which, after all, the president shared priority). And so, despite having a strong case buttressed by numerous science advisory bodies and widespread support among policymakers, funding for those three key science agencies actually decreased in FY 2008 relative to inflation.

Our point is not to disparage those who would strive to ensure Congress and the administration act on strong technical and scientific grounds when crafting policy. Indeed, that is what both of our organizations ask us to do in Washington, D.C. Rather, it is to temper the inevitable frustration that has and will occur when Congress appears to act irrationally in its science and technology policy as it seeks to balance competing interests. As long as the current political incentives are in place, reviving OTA won’t suddenly make Congress appear a great deal smarter about technology.

 

Cameron Wilson ( wilson_c@hq.acm.org) is the director of the ACM U. S. Public Policy Office in Washington, D. C.

Peter harsha ( harsha@cra.org) is the director of government affairs at the Computing Research Association (CRA) in Washington, D.C.

Calendar
of Events

September 16–17 Softvis ’08: International Symposium on Software Visualization, Munich, Germany, Contact: Christopher D. Hundhausen, Email: hundhaus@hawaii.edu

September 16–19
ACM Symposium on Document
Engineering, Brazil,
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Campos Pimentel,
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on Cognitive Ergonomics,
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September 20–23
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