Vviewpoints

DOI: 10.1145/1666420.1666436

it policy
making the Case
for Computing

Seeking funding for current and future computing initiatives requires
both a strong argument and a broad community of supporters.

WhEn it ComEs to dis- tributing trillions in U.S. taxpayer dollars, funding for science joins a crowded field of special interests where competition for federal funding is fierce. Policymakers are ultimately stewards of taxpayer dollars and must make judgments about the areas in which government has a legitimate reason to invest. And because tax dollars are not limitless, policymakers must prioritize federal investments, deciding which programs or which agencies have the most compelling need for funding.

Consequently, every special in-
terest—from researchers to road-
builders, health care professionals
to hovercraft manufacturers—has an
advocacy group urging policymakers
to focus federal investment in their
particular area. What ties all of these
groups together is the need to have a
story—a case to make to Congress,
the Administration and the American
people—that justifies the expenditure
of those tax dollars on the things they
care about.

funding Decisions

The stakes are high. Last year (fiscal
year 2009), the U.S. discretionary bud-
get—that is, the amount not automati-
cally committed to federal programs
like Social Security or Medicare—was
just over $1 trillion. Congress spent
that money, as it does every year, by
parceling it out to federal agencies
and programs in 12 separate pieces
of legislation. This is quite literally a
zero-sum game. Aggregate spending
by Congress is capped, and each of
these 12 appropriations bills has its
own spending cap. This means that
once the spending caps are reached—
and they always are—any additional
increase in spending for one program
must be offset by an equal reduction
in another program.

Government funding for computing research is tight and the competition plentiful. A new infrastructure for computational oceanography incorporating the Vistrails system created by the university of utah was among the scientific projects receiving support from the national Science foundation’s Cluster exploratory (Clue) program in 2009.