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House Science Committee Advances Controversial NSF Reauthorization Bill

  
[Updates: As expected, the House Science Committee introduced and advanced a bill to re-authorize the 2007 and 2010 COMPETES Acts. H.R. 4186, the Frontiers in Innovation, Research, Science, and Technology (FIRST) Act, was introduced early last week and then marked up in subcommittee on Thursday, advancing on party lines.

The ASA joined scores of other organizations and universities in opposing the FIRST Act as introduced because of numerous provisions of the bill. Among the most concerning are its flat funding for the NSF, its cutting of funding for the Social, Behavioral, and Economic Sciences (SBE) directorate, and its language perceived as meddling with NSF's peer review process. The bill had the unusual provision of setting authorization level at the directorate level (and not just the top line, or R&RA and EHR lines.) In the subcommittee markup, $50 million was restored to the SBE directorate but it still cuts the SBE budget by 22% from FY14 funding levels. As mentioned last week in Ron Wasserstein's blog entry on ASA Advocacy, "This directorate funds important research across the board but two of the more important components [for the statistical community] are the National Center for Science and Engineering Statistics and the Methodology, Measurement, and Statistics Program." 

The original COMPETES Act was a response to the National Academies' 2007 report, Rising Above the Gathering Storm: Energizing and Employing America for a Brighter Economic Future, written by the Committee on Prospering in the Global Economy of the 21st Century: An Agenda for American Science and Technology. The report warned of the U.S. losing its lead in research and innovation, which in turn undermined U.S. economic competitiveness in the global economy. It urged large boosts in basic research funding and a strengthening of our STEM education system. The 2007 and 2010 COMPETES act authorized increased in basic research funding, with the former approving a seven-year doubling path and the latter a ten-year doubling path. FIRST has funding levels that don't match inflation.

My 12/26/13 blog entry, 2013 in Review for ASA Science Policy; Items to Watch in 2014, has some of the background on the House Science Committee's action last week. See the sections, "Funding for social, behavioral, and economic research" and "NSF Grant Funding Process."

See also:
​See other ASA Science Policy blog entries. For ASA science policy updates, follow @ASA_SciPol on Twitter. For more on ASA science policy, see http://amstat.org/policy/.
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