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Banging The Drum For Basic Research
by Randy Barrett
Traditionally balkanized high-tech lobbying groups have become remarkably unified lately on the need to boost basic research funding at the federal level.
Last week, members of TechNet and the Information Technology Industry Council (ITI) visited lawmakers and White House movers to, among other goals, paint dire pictures of an America in danger of losing its competitive edge. According to TechNet, government expenditures on R&D have remained relatively flat for more than a decade. Meanwhile, China doubled its R&D investment from 0.6 percent to 1.2 percent of gross domestic product between 1995 and 2002.
"We are gravely under-investing in research and development," Nasdaq stock-market CEO Robert Greifeld said at TechNet's Tuesday press briefing. "It is impossible to maintain economic growth without strong R&D growth."
A Case Of 'Insidious Dry Rot'?
The Bush administration has requested $132.3 billion for overall R&D in fiscal 2006, up $733 million, or 1 percent, over fiscal 2005. But the White House cut basic research's section of the pie by $320 million. Howls since have erupted from congressional science advocates.
On March 7, the House Science Committee chastised the administration for favoring developmental research. "Funding short-term development at the expense of longer-term basic and applied research is not advisable and neglects those portions of R&D where government support is most crucial," the panel wrote in a report critical of the budget request.
Such concerns are not new to Robert Boege, a lobbyist for the Alliance for Science and Technology Research in America (ASTRA), who has been beating the drum of doom about basic research for years. He calls the R&D funding issue one of "insidious dry rot."
According to ASTRA, government funding of basic R&D in engineering and life sciences has stagnated at about $8 billion per year since 1980. Meanwhile, government R&D spending on physical sciences, mathematics and engineering as a share of gross domestic product is steadily dropping and now stands at 0.16 percent, down from 0.24 percent in 1970.
The fall in funding has coincided with a troubling boom in the number of U.S. patents awarded to foreign entities, Boege said. Between 1989 and 1999, the number of those patents soared from 70,000 to 120,000, according to ASTRA data.
But in a tight budget environment, tech R&D advocates said the fight for more money will be entirely uphill. "We're in competition with all the other people in this town that want money for something else," said Ralph Hellmann, senior vice president of government relations for ITI. "We're going to have to just flat out beat them."
Scrapping For Dollars
Hellmann plans to work with other groups that are "in the same boat," and he hopes to win the attention of House Appropriations Committee Chairman Jerry Lewis, R-Calif., and panel ranking Democrat David Obey of Wisconsin, and their counterparts in the Senate, Republican Thad Cochran of Mississippi and Robert Byrd of West Virginia.
Another group historically less active in the R&D funding fight also has begun to work its angle. The Telecommunications Industry Association (TIA) is sending chief technology officers from its members companies to meet with lawmakers and officials at the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, Homeland Security Department, National Telecommunications and Information Administration and White House Office of Science and Technology Policy.
The problem, said Grant Seiffert, TIA's vice president of government relations, is that telecom companies have not been able to keep up with the quality or quantity of basic research that was handled by AT&T at Bell Labs for nearly 100 years before the breakup of the company in 1982. "We're all on an 18-month development cycle now," he said.
The U.S. government spends about $2 billion annually on networking and information technology R&D, according to TIA. But only about $150 million per year -- less than one-tenth -- is related to telecom research. TIA said that China, the European Union, Japan and South Korea are funding telecom R&D much more aggressively than the United States. An EU program has prioritized $4.7 billion "for information-society technologies research," which makes telecom R&D the largest funding category, the group said in a white paper.
TIA wants to see more R&D funding focused on advances in delivering high-speed Internet access, spectrum and equipment that can communicate across jurisdictions. But a veteran of the high-tech research funding wars said nobody in government is ready to commit the money.
"What's going on is a budgetary game of chicken," said Chris Jehn, vice president of government programs for Cray. "No one [department] feels it ought to pull the freight," and each is waiting for the next to shoulder the task.
Cray would like to see $250 million to $400 million in new federal aid for research in high-speed computing. That message does not seem to have reached the administration, which proposed cutting funding in that area by $31 million, or 3.2 percent, to $937 million in fiscal 2006.
"Any particular number is hard to justify," Jehn said. "The problem with basic research is you are pursuing blind alleys, and it doesn't lead to output that can be easily translated into products."
Struggling To Make The Story Stick
Deborah Wince-Smith, president of the U.S. Council on Competitiveness, is now taking a holistic approach to promoting basic R&D. In a report released last December titled Innovate America, the group called for a new national agenda to spur talent, investment and infrastructure. Some 133,000 copies of the report have been downloaded to date, she said.
New ideas include creating 5,000 portable graduate fellowships that would let recipients study at the institution of their choice, reforming immigration law to attract science and engineering stars, reallocating 3 percent of all federal agency R&D budgets for high-risk research, and creating national innovation prizes.
"I think there is a lot of room in the federal R&D budget to reprioritize," Wince-Smith said. "Agencies have become very conservative and risk averse."
Basic-research advocates now say they are focusing their energies on telling their cautionary tale -- over and over -- until somebody starts listening. "It's a very complex problem with a lot of moving parts," Boege said. "We have to be adept at communication."
Administration officials say they understand the R&D problem but can't do much more under the circumstances. "We're facing difficult budgetary restrains," said Ben Wu, the assistant Commerce secretary for technology policy. "If we could do more, we would support it."
But industry patience with government declarations of good intentions minus the funding to back it appears to be fading. "We can't afford to be silent on this or we'll wake up in 10 years and have some real issues," Seiffert said.
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