Two House Panels Contemplate the Fate of NIST Technology Programs

In recent weeks, the Department of Commerce’s Undersecretary of Technology, Mary Good, and the director of NIST, Arati Prabhakar, have appeared together at two separate hearings to defend the Administration’s civilian technology programs.

NIST, under the direction of Good’s Office of Technology Policy, assists American industry in several ways. In part, its intramural labs help set national standards and develop testing and measurement technologies, while its Advanced Technology Program (ATP) provides cost-shared grants to industry to encourage development of high-risk, long-term generic technologies. The ATP was conceived and implemented as an experimental program during the Bush Administration. President Clinton’s budgets have boosted it towards a national-scale program, with $490.0 million requested for FY 1996.

While there is general consensus on Capitol Hill over the federal government’s role in basic research and standards-setting, differences of opinion remain over how far the government should go in promoting technology development. The argument has split primarily along party lines, with many Republicans suggesting termination of programs such as ATP.

The hearings - by the House Commerce Appropriations Subcommittee on March 15, and the House Science Technology Subcommittee on March 23 - were part philosophical debate over the programs, and part pragmatic discussion about the ability to fund them in tight fiscal times. The chairs of both hearings had praise for NIST’s efforts. Harold Rogers (R-KY), chairman of the commerce appropriations subcommittee, warned, though, that “cuts are going to have to hit programs that are good” as well as bad.

Good and Prabhakar put up a spirited defense. When Rogers noted that U.S. industry has made a “comeback” in global competitiveness, Good said the comeback was achieved by focusing resources more narrowly on the short-term; on quality and process improvements. Noting that the amount American industry spends on long-term research had dropped in the past decade from about 20 percent to less than 8 percent, she said industry was “dipping out of the technology bucket [but] no longer putting anything in.”

Connie Morella (R-MD), whose district contains one of the NIST facilities, chaired the House technology subcommittee hearing. She stated that Congress is “faced with the challenge” of encouraging technology growth while operating “under very tight budget constraints.” She asked whether the government could assist industry by reforming regulations, the tax code, and product liability laws. Good responded that “we have to have all of these,” including the NIST programs.

When Ken Calvert (R-CA) criticized the government’s ability to guide technology development, Good and Prabhakar replied in unison that the programs were “not government-guided.” “The ATP is a platform that enables industry to make long-term investments,” Prabhakar explained. “It does not instruct industry as to where to make the investments.”

Asked whether the program qualified as “corporate welfare,” to large companies, Prabhakar said many of the participants were small companies that were not able to compete in the global marketplace on their own. She insisted that the programs did not “pick winners and losers;" industry came forward with the ideas, and private sector experts helped evaluate the technical and business merit of the proposals.

A second panel of witnesses at the Morella hearing included several entrepreneurs who brought success stories of ATP assistance, and several representatives from conservative think tanks, who presented theoretical arguments for why the government should not support ATP. While the think tank representatives stated that the government should allow the marketplace and venture capitalists to fund technology development, the entrepreneurs claimed that technologies funded by ATP were at too early a stage for venture capitalists to take a risk on, and too generic for individual companies to get sufficient return from. They testified that the government assistance helped them progress to the point where they could obtain other funding.

While it is too early to measure full results from the ATP, Prabhakar said that early evidence indicates “we’re on track.” However, that may not be sufficient to protect the program when budgets are being slashed throughout the government. Already, cuts to the FY 1995 ATP budget have been proposed in H.R. 889, a defense supplemental bill. That bill will now go to a House-Senate conference.