NIST Appropriations, Authorization, ATP Report

The Department of Commerce’s National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) has recently seen action on both the appropriations and authorization fronts. The FY 1999 budgets for the Departments of Commerce, Justice and State are subject to a June 15, 1999 cutoff date, unless the issue of how the Commerce Department will conduct the 2000 Census is settled (see FYI #147, 1998 ). NIST, as well as the rest of the Commerce Department’s Technology Administration, is also due for reauthorization this year. On April 21, the Senate authorizing subcommittee with jurisdiction over NIST received testimony on the institute’s proposed budget for FY 2000. Also recently, a report was issued on NIST’s Advanced Technology Program (ATP).

Republicans and Democrats have not yet reached agreement on whether to incorporate statistical sampling into the 2000 Census. Although both House Speaker Dennis Hastert (R-IL) and Minority Leader Richard Gephardt (D-MO) hope to eliminate the June 15 deadline for funding of the departments involved, House Democrats rejected an April 22 proposal by Hastert to separate the census dispute from the other appropriations. In a March letter to appropriators, Supreme Court Chief Justice William Rehnquist warned of the impact of holding the appropriations hostage to the census controversy. He called for exempting the judicial branch from the funding cutoff, arguing that it “should not, and does not, have any role in this debate.”

The April 21 hearing of the Senate Commerce Subcommittee on Science, Technology, and Space produced general praise for NIST. Subcommittee members all emphasized the importance of science and technology to the nation, and the value of NIST’s role. They were pleased that the Technology Administration acted upon the guidance in last year’s reathorization bill, which covered fiscal years 1998 and 1999. In response to the bill, the Technology Administration established an Experimental Program to Stimulate Competitive Technology (EPSCoT) modelled after EPSCoR; expanded the Malcolm Baldrige Awards to the categories of education and healthcare; extended federal support for the Manufacturing Extension Partnership (MEP) centers beyond their sixth year; supported a program to enhance teacher training in science and math education, and established an Office of Space Commercialization within the Technology Administration.

Senators Rockefeller (D-WV) and Breaux (D-LA) shared concerns that the EPSCoT program, in its third year, was slated for a substantial decrease in funding for FY 2000. Gary Bachula, Acting Commerce Under Secretary for Technology Administration, professed himself a strong advocate for the program and said that funding would be provided for program evaluation but no awards in FY 2000. He admitted that the main reason behind the funding cut was “budget priorities.” Rockefeller noted that “if you want to bury something for good, the way to do it is to stop funding it [for a year] and evaluate it.” He warned that the subcommittee “cares about this program.”

NIST Director Ray Kammer was pleased to describe the institute’s progress on many of his priorities, including expanding the Baldrige award program, extending MEP scope and funding, building greater consensus on the ATP, increasing U.S. involvement in international standards-setting, and making the best standards and measurements available to U.S. industry. NIST’s standards and measurement work will be enhanced by the recent completion of the Advanced Chemical Sciences Laboratory, and the plans to build an Advanced Measurement Laboratory, which Kammer said “will be the best measurement lab in the world.”

Regarding ATP, Kammer said NIST was “beginning to amass a great deal of evidence” that the program works. Subcommittee chairman Bill Frist (R-TN) questioned the elimination of some focused competitions for specific technology areas. Kammer explained that as part of the effort to build a greater consensus for ATP, those focused competitions were incorporated into a general competition, to “let the quality of the proposals determine” what areas get funding.

This hearing will likely provide input for efforts later this year to draft new NIST reauthorization legislation, although Frist did not indicate when that might happen.

Last month, NIST released a 134-page document by an independent consultant, which reviews the first group of completed ATP projects. The report, “ATP: Performance of Completed Projects: Status Report No. 1,” looks as 50 projects for which ATP’s involvement was terminated or concluded by March 1997. Of those awards, 12 were terminated early, while ATP completed its role in the other 38. Of the 38 completed projects examined, 34 were single applicants (mostly small companies), and four were joint ventures. ATP contributed a total of $64.6 million, less than half of the total spent on the 38 completed projects. The median length of the award was three years.

It was beyond the scope of the report to conduct a quantitative analysis of the economic returns for each of the 38 projects, in part because “most of their benefits and many of their costs are yet to come.” The report did incorporate three previously- performed in-depth case studies and provided a “snapshot” of progress for the rest of the projects to determine that “ATP appears to be on track in fulfilling its mission to stimulate economic growth by helping American companies...overcome significant technical challenges...” The three previous case studies concluded that “the estimated economic benefits to the nation resulting from just these three projects would exceed the ATP’s costs for all 38 completed projects as well as the 12 terminated projects -- indeed, the estimated benefits would exceed the total costs of all projects funded to date by the ATP.” For the rest of the 38 projects, the study “document[s] a number of project performance characteristics that will be useful for detailed estimates of returns.” Such indicators include contributions to the scientific knowledge base, technological breakthroughs, dissemination of technological information, publications, company growth, stock offerings, patents, technologies commercialized, accelerated time-to-market, and the participants’ ability to attract additional capital and partners, as well as the benefit to consumers of new or improved products and processes.

The report notes, “Because the technology development efforts are for the most part still works in progress, this report is not expected to be the last word on their accomplishments. It remains the task of future studies to provide a more comprehensive assessment of their long-run impacts.” It can be obtained on the NIST web site at http://www.atp.nist.gov/atp/pubs.htm or by emailing to atp@nist.gov or calling 301-975-2064 .