NIST Field Hearing: Blueprint for the Future
As the designated helpmate of US industry, the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) has been in the congressional spotlight several times in recent weeks. Last week, the House Science Subcommittee on Technology, Environment and Aviation reviewed NIST’s role in helping the defense industry to diversify (see FYI #99.) On Monday, a field hearing at the NIST campus in Gaithersburg, Maryland, brought members of the subcommittee out to hear NIST’s plans for the large budget increase President Clinton has designated for it over the next five years.
Clinton’s plan includes a quadrupling of NIST’s total budget over current year funding of $384 million by fiscal year 1997. The increased funds will go toward enhancing NIST’s major programs: the Manufacturing Extension Partnership (MEP), which disseminates manufacturing knowledge and technologies to small businesses across the country; the Advanced Technology Program (ATP), which provides cost-shared, competitive awards to industry to develop innovative technologies; and intramural research performed at NIST labs on generic technologies, measurement methods, standards, and processing improvements.
At the hearing, NIST director Arati Prabhakar discussed NIST’s position “at the center of a shifting approach to the federal role in supporting technology.” She views the MEP program as a near-term effort to help companies “re-engineer to meet new market demands,” and the ATP as a longer-term initiative to support infrastructure technologies “to stimulate industry’s ability to compete.” Under the Administration’s plan, the MEP will grow to approximately 100 outreach centers by 1997. This program, Prabhakar said, will receive a “jumpstart” by being a part of Clinton’s Technology Reinvestment Program (TRP) for defense conversion. The plans for the ATP include instituting a second type of proposal solicitation. Proposals would be solicited for work in specific critical technologies in addition to general awards. Prabhakar said she hoped that the awards would encourage coordinated sets of proposals aimed at a single goal.
Subcommittee members raised the question of the balance of funding between extramural programs and the intramural research done at NIST labs. Prabhakar argued that NIST’s intramural research was “a key part of how we help industry.” She was seconded by William Howard, chairman of the Visiting Committee on Advanced Technology, a NIST advisory body. Howard stated that “the laboratories are NIST’s technology drivers and underpin everything that it does.” He particularly praised the labs’ successes at cooperative agreements with industry, citing NIST’s collaborative process as an example to be followed by other federal R&D agencies. Prabhakar called it “essential that our laboratory efforts be strengthened at the same time that our extramural programs are receiving increased support.” She reported that the President supports a doubling over the next four years of the intramural research budget- which has remained virtually flat since the early 1970s- as well as funding for repairs and renovations at the labs.
However, as reported in FYI #100, the future of NIST’s fiscal year 1994 budget increase is not yet assured. The Senate Appropriations Committee has recommended giving NIST the full amount requested by the President, but the House bill reduced that amount from $535.2 million to $433.7 million. (The House version of the Commerce, Justice, State appropriations bill, H.R. 2519, was passed by the full House on July 20; the Senate version is currently under consideration on the Senate floor.)
The decrease recommended by the House does not represent a criticism of NIST’s programs, but rather a concern that some of those programs have not yet been authorized. The House cut nearly $2 billion from the appropriations bill for unauthorized programs, of which the reduction to NIST was only a small fraction. There is some expectation that a portion of these cuts might be restored in the House-Senate conference.
