Folks are still scratching their heads about the US House of Representatives’ vote on Thursday to scuttle legislation extending the 2007 America COMPETES Act, which called for a doubling of research funding in the physical sciences. Democrats had already scaled back the bill in response to concerns about the federal deficit, but they were surprised to see pornography (among other things) convert what had been a fairly bipartisan effort into an election-year campaign issue.
House Science Committee Chairman Bart Gordon (Democrat, Tennessee) offers a quick summary of what happened here, but the Tennessean nicely captured Gordon’s anger during the debate. Here’s an outtake: “Everybody raise your hand that’s for pornography. Come on, raise your hand. Nobody? Nobody is for pornography? Well, I’m shocked.”
Ranking Republican Ralph Hall of Texas explains the Republican position here. The Republican proposal would have frozen authorization at the Energy Department, the National Science Foundation and the National Institutes of Science and Technology beginning in fiscal 2011. The amendment also would have zeroed out the budget of the Advanced Research Projects Agency – Energy, a new effort to promote high-risk high-reward energy research.
Once it became clear that the amendment was going to pass, Gordon told Democrats to go ahead and vote for it so that Republicans wouldn’t be able to portray Democrats as voting for pornography in the run up to the elections in November. He then yanked the bill off the floor, reserving the right to try again later.
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It’s not entirely clear what all of this means, but the first thing to keep in mind is that this was an “authorization” bill focused on fiscal 2011 and beyond, not an “appropriations” bill. And so even if such a bill were to be enacted, the appropriators would ultimately decide how much money will or won’t be spent.
But authorization bills nonetheless give an indication of where things are going, so does a vote against pornography translate into a vote against science? Clearly the answer to that question is no. “What happened yesterday was certainly disappointing, but I don’t think there was anybody on the floor that said they were somehow opposed to spending money on basic research,” says Deborah Altenburg, director of federal relations at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute and president of The Science Coalition, which released a report this week underscoring the value of basic research.
Even Hall went out of his way to say that he supports the underlying goals of the COMPETES Act. On the other hand, concerns about federal spending aren’t going to go away anytime soon, says Michael Lubell, director of public affairs at the American Physical Society in Washington. Insofar as ARPA-E is concerned, Energy Secretary Steven Chu remains the programme’s biggest supporter, but Lubell says appropriators on both sides of the aisle have always been a bit skeptical about creating a new bureaucracy for such research.
“My guess is they would give ARPA-E some money to continue and then evaluate whether the proposals that the agency has funded are really working well,” Lubell says.