Administration Seeks 28% Increase in FY 2000 IT Budget

One of the Clinton Administration’s major science and technology initiatives in the FY 2000 budget request to be sent to Congress will be a $366 million, or 28%, increase, in information technology research. The program, called “Information Technology for the Twenty-First Century,” or IT2, will (according to a draft administration document) support the following types of activities:

“Long-term information technology research that will lead to fundamental breakthroughs in computing and communications,”

“Advanced computing for science, engineering, and the Nation, including software, networks, supercomputers, and research teams needed to support it,”

“Research on the economic and social implications of the Information Revolution and efforts to help train additional information technology workers at our universities.”

The additional $366 million is based on a baseline budget of roughly $1.3 billion, and would be distributed among six departments and agencies:

National Science Foundation - $146 million
Department of Defense - $100 million
Department of Energy - $70 million
NASA - $38 million
NIH - $ 6 million
NOAA - $6 million

A senior management team consisting of top officials from each of these agencies, the Office of Management and Budget, and the National Economic Council will report directly to Neal Lane, the President’s Advisor for Science and Technology. It will “set policy and coordinate the work of this new initiative.” A working group, chaired by the NSF Assistant Director for Computer and Information Science and Engineering, will support this team.

Earlier this week, DOE Under Secretary Ernest Moniz provided further information on IT2. DOE’s primary focus will involve advanced computing for problems of national importance, identified as global systems and combustion systems. DOE will also initiate applications in, according to a briefing paper, “basic sciences, including, but not limited to, material science, structural genomics, plasma physics, high energy physics, and subsurface transport.” Moniz said DOE would be “joined at the hip with NSF” in the development of large-scale infrastructure. The target date for hardware and software is 2003/2004 in what Moniz identified as a five year effort, resulting in “computing and information technologies 100-1000 times more powerful than available today.” Moniz said the $366 million was new money, that was a “presidential commitment late in the year,” involving many discussions with the Office of Management and Budget.

This initiative, Moniz declared, “has the potential to be a significantly transformational one for science.” IT2 would reshape how experimental programs are carried out, making simulation a new tool for discovery. The Under Secretary called IT2 as big a challenge as any other major initiative in the last few decades, requiring “a new kind of large scale team-building in the scientific community.” IT2 will be, a senior departmental official added, “the great enabler.”