Unsettling Hearing for NIST

Top officials of the Commerce Department and the National Institute of Standards and Technology testified at a key hearing on Wednesday before the Senate Appropriations Subcommittee on Commerce, Justice, and State. It was a somewhat unsettling experience.

Hearings are one of the better ways to get a reading about how an agency or program is perceived by Congress. Appropriations hearings, while usually fairly low key, provide the only public preview of what might be the dimensions of forthcoming appropriations legislation, which provides funding for an agency.

Commerce Under Secretary for Technology Mary Good, NIST Director Arati Prabhakar and six other officials appeared before subcommittee chairman Judd Gregg (R-NH) and Ranking Minority Member Ernest Hollings (D-SC). Gregg, known as being reserved, and Hollings, were the only senators of this 11-member subcommittee to attend the hearing. It was over in less than 45 minutes.

It is customary for committee chairs to spend a few moments welcoming hearing witnesses, and later often engage witnesses in probing questioning. There was almost none of this dialogue by the chairman. Gregg came into the hearing room, sat down, and promptly asked Good to give her presentation. Sitting directly across from her, he showed no reaction to Good’s testimony. Prabhakar followed Good, again eliciting neither verbal nor non-verbal reaction from Gregg.

Following this testimony Gregg asked Hollings, a long-time proponent of NIST and its Advanced Technology Program, to begin the questioning. Hollings asked a series of friendly questions to get some information into the written record. He expressed mild disdain for the technology policy of what he called the “House crowd,” mentioning House Science Committee Chairman Robert Walker (R-PA) by name.

Gregg asked only two questions. He asked Good to differentiate between the Commerce Department’s Office of Technology Policy and the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy. His second question was about the use of a 1995 NIST appropriation to renovate NIST laboratories, saying that this flew in the face of the intention of Congress for this funding not to be so spent. He characterized Prabhakar’s explanation of why the renovation was necessary as “rather weak.” And with that, he adjourned the hearing.

Gregg’s response should not be seen as the final indicator of how the agency is likely to do in the appropriation bill that the subcommittee’s Republicans will be drafting in the next few months. At the same time, Gregg’s apparent lack of visible enthusiasm for the Commerce Department’s technology programs seems worrisome.