The U.S. Senate Commerce, Science, & Transportation Committee recently approved its reauthorization of America COMPETES – S.3084, the American Innovation and Competitiveness Act.
The bipartisan legislation introduced by Senators Cory Gardner (R-CO) and Gary Peters (D-MI) authorizes programs at the National Science Foundation (NSF), National Institutes of Standards and Technology (NIST), and activities of the Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP).
Here are the highlights of the bill:
- Provides funding authorization levels for the next two fiscal years.
- For FY 2017, NSF would be funded at $7.510 billion and NIST at $974 million, which are the current funding levels proposed by the Senate Commerce, Justice, Science Appropriations bill.
- For FY 2018, a 4 percent increase (not including inflation) would be authorized to $7.810 billion for NSF and $1.013 billion for NIST.
- Reaffirms that NSF’s peer review process for evaluating grant proposals is the appropriate process for funding grant proposals, and does not target specific directorates.
- Directs NSF to issue guidance on transparency and accountability in the merit review process to counter Congressional ‘waste books’ and ‘national interest’ efforts.
- Seeks to improve interagency as well as government and private sector coordination and communication among Networking and Information Technology Research and Development (NITRD) programs. Additionally, the measure focuses the NITRD program on areas of increasing importance and requires the development of strategic plans for various high-performance computing research.
- Allows NIST to provide financial and logistical support for research fellowships and authorizes the NIST post-doctoral fellowship program.
- Directs NSF to evaluate needs in mid-scale range ($4 million to $100 million) and develop a strategy to meet research needs, including facilities.
- Establishes an interagency Academic Research Regulation Working Group to explore opportunities to reduce burdens on researchers and in consult with academic researchers, institutions of higher education, and scientific societies.
- Sets a goal for the NASA Space Grant program to spend no more than 5 percent of appropriated funds on costs to administer the program.
- Authorizes NSF to provide grants to universities to research computer science education and computational thinking to improve computer science education in K-12 schools.
- Requires re-competition of Manufacturing Extension Partnership (MEP) Improvement awards every ten years, also sets MEP cost-share at 50 percent.
- Authorizes the NSF I-Corps program to improve entrepreneurship for basic researchers and expand to other agencies, as well as add follow-on commercialization grants to this program for commercializing federally funded research.
- Authorizes NSF commercialization grants to improve the commercialization of federally funded research.
- Includes an approved amendment offered by Senator Daines (R-MT) that would require the NSF inspector general to audit the agency’s policies and procedures for sub-recipient monitoring. The higher education community opposed this amendment and continue to support the elimination of sub-recipient monitoring, particularly in instances where the primary and the sub of the funds are subject to the Single Audit Act.
Ahead of the Committee’s consideration of the bill, AAU and APLU sent statements that included support for the policy provisions and concern for funding levels that lag our global competitors’ investment in basic and applied research.
The path forward for this authorization bill is unclear. Given the shortened election year calendar and the priority of attempting to pass appropriations bills before the end of the fiscal year, this legislation is not likely to see Senate floor time. In the event it does, it is less likely that enough time remains on the calendar for both Chambers to conference their COMPETES reauthorization bill.
The Penn State Office of Government and Community Relations will continue to advocate for NSF and NIST policy and funding issues and share any updates on this authorization process.