Good News for Science in the Budget Prospectus

By Fred W. Weingarten

The administration had good news for science, for the National Science Foundation, and for computing research in its R&D budget request for FY 1999. Science Advisor John Gibbons said the requested increases in FY 99 funding were the "largest in history" for non-defense research. As expected, the largest beneficiary was NIH, which received an 8% increase of $1.1 billion, but NSF received a 10% raise of $344 million.

Computing research was mentioned by several speakers not only as an important field in itself, but as a major enabler of other areas of research. Both the Vice President and Harold Varmus, Director of NIH, noted that the major new opportunities in the health field are due in large part to contributions from federally funded research in areas such as computer science.

Two important overall trends were pointed out: 1) the shift from development to longer term research in the defense R&D budget, and 2) the proportionally large growth in university-based research funding (up 18%).

NSF’s increases were substantial and across the board, with computing leading the pack with a 16.5% increase.

Table 1-A indicates the distribution within CISE. One complicating factor in looking at these numbers is a reorganization that took place last year, making it particularly difficult to draw meaning from the trends within divisions. This is not a new problem, though, since programs and funding areas are always being shuffled around among divisions and programs at some level.

In both infrastructure divisions (ACIR and ANIR) the research spending is scheduled to increase substantially. Networking research, in particular, will have a 72% increase over its current $8.38 million level.

CISE will also be increasing its investment in Knowledge and Distributed Intelligence by $14.12 million. This program ran into some resistance last year in the Senate Appropriations Committee . Although funds were ultimately put in the budget, NSF was asked not to proceed until a more detailed program plan was sent to Congress. NSF feels that those problems have been put behind them and is moving ahead on the initiative, both spending this year’s money and asking for an increase next year.

One final point. Last year, the appropriations committees directed NSF to spend $23 million on networking connections and research this year from fees collected by NSI for domain name registrations. Those funds are now frozen by a court and their availability is uncertain. They are not reflected in the "Current" budget numbers for CISE—probably one reason the increase for ANIR looks unusually high.

Table 1-A

CISE Division definitions:

CCR

Computer Communications Research

IIS

Information and Intelligent Systems

EIA

Experimental and Integrative Activities

ACIR

Advanced Computational Infrastructure and Research

ANIR

Advanced Networking Infrastructure and Research