NIST: Friends in High Places
“Funding for science without funding for facilities is a losing game.” -- Sen. Paul Sarbanes (D-MD)
After threats in recent years to move or privatize the Commerce Department’s National Institute of Standards and Technology and to zero out one of its major components, the institute held a press conference on December 4 to highlight its success in the FY 1998 appropriations process. NIST was the only research agency that President Clinton vowed to protect during the past year’s budget negotiations. NIST received $678.0 million for FY 1998, an increase of 20 percent over FY 1997 (after FY 1997 rescissions are taken into account.)
Much of NIST’s budget increase was due to recognition that the institute’s research labs desperately need renovation and new construction in order to continue their world-class research. (The sharing of the 1997 Nobel Prize in Physics by NIST scientist William Phillips is representative of such research.) NIST has been updating its master facilities plan, and in anticipation of the completed plan, Congress provided $95.0 million this year for “construction, renovation and maintenance of NIST facilities.” The influx of funds will allow for completion in late 1998 of the Advanced Chemical Sciences Laboratory, and for plans to go forward on a new Advanced Measurement Laboratory (AML.) President Clinton had requested construction funding of $16.7 million. According to sources at NIST, the Administration intended to request funds to begin the AML in its FY 1999 budget submission.
Speakers at the press conference included Commerce Secretary William Daley and the Members of Congress for NIST’s Gaithersburg, MD campus: Democratic Senators Paul Sarbanes and Barbara Mikulski, and Republican Representative Connie Morella. Praising the legislators for working hard to ensure funding for the institute, Daley said the budget for the current fiscal year “is testimony to their commitment.” He reviewed his priorities for NIST construction and maintenance. First came safety and emergency repairs and maintenance. Completion of the Advanced Chemical Sciences Laboratory was second, and third was “a desperately needed Advanced Measurement Laboratory.” Although he saw “prospects...brightening” for the Measurement Lab, Daley said much hard work remained to be done “both within the Administration and by Congress before this plan can become a reality.”
All three Maryland legislators concurred on the importance of NIST, agreeing with Sarbanes that the institute “is at the very heart of the nation’s competitive advantage in research, technology and engineering.” Mikulski, a member of the Senate Commerce-Justice-State Appropriations Subcommittee, commended the NIST researchers, saying, “my job is to support you -- to make sure you have the physical infrastructure to match the intellectual infrastructure.” Morella, who chairs the House Science Subcommittee on Technology, remarked that the extra construction funds were a “congressional affirmation of the importance of NIST to the nation.” She recalled being informed that “it would be next to impossible” to get more funding without a presidential request. But, she said, she knew “NIST could ultimately count on its friends and patrons to make [it] possible.” Morella declared, “we in Congress are committed to NIST’s modernization crusade.”
After signing NIST’s spending bill, President Clinton used his line-item veto to remove a $5 million earmark within the institute’s intramural research programs. If not overturned, this will leave the FY 1998 appropriation for NIST’s core laboratory research at $268.9 million, approximately equal to FY 1997 funding. (The laboratory research, plus $3.0 million for the Malcolm Baldrige Quality Award, make up NIST’s Scientific and Technical Research and Services.)
