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What’s Ahead
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| Image credit – The White House |
Congress Breaks for July 4 With Busy Month to Follow
The House and Senate are on recess this week for Independence Day and a packed agenda awaits them when they return. Next week, House appropriators will finish work on their fiscal year 2022 spending bills, taking up their proposals for an array of science agencies on Monday and sending them to the full committee for consideration later in the week. Senate appropriators have not yet announced their schedule, though they may begin public debate before departing on the month-long August recess. Outside the appropriations process, maneuvering will continue around a potential bipartisan infrastructure spending package as well as a Democratic spending package that would circumvent the Senate filibuster using the budget reconciliation process. How R&D and research infrastructure spending might figure into such special spending packages remains up in the air.
At the end of the month, the House Armed Services Committee will hold subcommittee debates on its version of the annual National Defense Authorization Act, though the full committee will not take up the bill until September. The House Science Committee is expected to advance additional legislation that will figure into negotiations over the Senate’s U.S. Innovation and Competition Act, but the committee has not indicated if it plans to do so this summer. Meanwhile, President Biden’s picks to lead the National Nuclear Security Administration and the Defense Department’s research and engineering enterprise are awaiting votes by the full Senate. The nominees to be the Department of Energy’s under secretary for science and director of its Office of Science have been waiting for consideration from the Energy and Natural Resources Committee since April.
Science Committee Chair Weighs In on Budget Priorities
In a bid to influence the House’s forthcoming spending bills, Science Committee Chair Eddie Bernice Johnson (D-TX) sent letters to the Appropriations Committee last week that endorse some of the Biden administration’s budget requests while flagging others as inadequate or lacking detail. Johnson registered her opposition to the proposed Advanced Research Projects Agency for Climate, stating her committee currently has no plans to authorize such an agency and would need “far more convincing information” on its justification and intended structure before proceeding. She also called it “disappointing, and frankly perplexing” that the budget request is not more responsive to the long-range fusion research plan recently prepared for the Department of Energy and further noted the request does not address fusion priorities established in the Energy Act of 2020. Other areas she suggested are underfunded in the request include heliophysics research at NASA, facilities repair at the National Institute of Standards and Technology, and ocean exploration research at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. For the National Science Foundation, Johnson wrote she is pleased that the goals of the administration’s proposed technology directorate “closely mirror” provisions of her committee’s NSF for the Future Act.
Research Security Roundtable Convenes
This week, the National Academies’ National Science, Technology, and Security Roundtable is holding its third public meeting since its launch late last year. The event will begin Wednesday with a briefing by officials from the FBI and the Office of the Director of National Intelligence followed by a discussion on “international collaboration and engagement” with the presidents of Carnegie Mellon University and the University of Florida. On Thursday, a panel of inspectors general from the National Institutes of Health, National Science Foundation, and Department of Energy will present findings from recent investigations. Congress mandated the roundtable’s creation through a 2019 law in order to, among other purposes, serve as a forum for issues related to “protecting United States national and economic security while ensuring the open exchange of ideas and international talent required for scientific progress and American leadership in science and technology.”
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In Case You Missed It
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| House Science Committee Chair Eddie Bernice Johnson (D-TX) is the lead sponsor of the NSF and DOE Science for the Future Acts. (Image credit – Bill Ingalls / NASA) |
NSF and DOE Expansion Bills Sail Through House
The House approved legislation last week that recommends Congress rapidly ramp up funding for the National Science Foundation and Department of Energy Office of Science over the coming five years. The NSF for the Future Act passed by a vote of 345 to 67 and the DOE Science for the Future Act by a vote of 351 to 68, with only Republicans voting against each. The bills are the first in a series the House intends to pass that will serve as the basis for negotiations over a compromise to the Senate’s U.S. Innovation and Competition Act. During the floor debate, House Science Committee Chair Eddie Bernice Johnson (D-TX) argued that Congress should not craft science policy principally through the lens of competition with China, which is the central purpose of the Senate bill. “While we should be cognizant of our increasing global competition, we must not be constrained by it. To continue to lead, we must chart our own course,” she remarked. President Biden applauded the bills’ passage in a statement and said his administration “looks forward to continuing to work with the House and the Senate in producing a final bill I can sign.”
House Foreign Affairs Panel Defers Vote on China Policy Bill
In contrast to its science legislation, the House has not united around a counterpart to the U.S. Innovation and Competition Act’s foreign policy provisions. The House Foreign Affairs Committee deferred final votes on amendments to Democrats’ Ensuring American Global Leadership and Engagement (EAGLE) Act last week after Republicans on the panel sought numerous changes. A substitute version they offered includes provisions to tighten export controls on “critical technologies” and extend foreign investment reviews to the higher education sector. They also objected to the EAGLE Act’s recommendation that the U.S. contribute $8 billion to the U.N. Green Climate Fund over the next two years in support of global climate change mitigation initiatives. Committee Democrats opposed the proposed substitute and many of the Republicans’ other amendments, which included proposals to ban the National Institutes of Health from funding entities in China and to bar the State Department from issuing visas to researchers with current or past affiliations with the Chinese military. The committee did accept an amendment that would require the government to “publish a list of research, engineering, and scientific institutions affiliated with or funded by” the Chinese military. The committee plans to complete work on the bill next week.
Reps. Raskin and Chu Blast DOJ ‘China Initiative’ Strategy
House Civil Rights Subcommittee Chair Jamie Raskin (D-MD) and Congressional Asian Pacific American Caucus Chair Judy Chu (D-CA) convened a virtual roundtable last week to criticize the Department of Justice’s China Initiative, which aims to guard against the misappropriation of U.S.-funded research by the Chinese government but has come under increasing scrutiny. While stating it is important to fight espionage, Raskin and Chu argued that DOJ has pursued a number of unmeritorious cases against ethnically Chinese scientists that amount to racial profiling. Raskin cited a 2018 law review article that found cases against Chinese American scientists accused of espionage are more than twice as likely as other criminal prosecutions to result in acquittals or dropped charges. Raskin and Chu also condemned DOJ’s practice of pursuing prosecutions of academic researchers for failures to disclose connections to China with no associated espionage charges. “Whereas most investigations start with a crime and then find a suspect, this initiative starts with a suspect and then searches for a crime,” Chu argued. Two witnesses, physicist Xiaoxing Xi and hydrologist Sherry Chen, described their experiences being prosecuted on charges that were later dropped. Former Energy Secretary Steven Chu warned about chilling effects that he said the federal campaign against research misappropriation is having on international scientific exchanges. University of California, Berkeley Vice Chancellor for Research Randy Katz recounted pressure from a federal agency to investigate scientific conduct he regarded as essentially benign. “Collaboration with Chinese researchers appears to be an invitation for an investigation,” he suggested in his written testimony.
House Appropriators Meet USGS Request, Short Change ARPA–C
House appropriators voted 32 to 24 on July 1 to approve spending legislation for the U.S Geological Survey, among other agencies, meeting the Biden administration’s request for a 25% boost to its $1.3 billion topline. Across USGS mission areas, the bill’s proposed amounts largely reflect administration priorities, though it would provide only half the $60 million requested to help launch a new cross-government Advanced Research Projects Agency for Climate. House appropriators have provided none of the funding requested for ARPA–C through the Environmental Protection Agency and Department of Agriculture. Separately, the appropriators voted last week to approve the overarching budget allocations for each of its 12 subcommittees for fiscal year 2022 and continued processing nearly 3,000 earmark requests from members of Congress, which includes around 200 science-related projects totaling about $400 million, according to a new tracking tool developed by the American Association for the Advancement of Science.
Science Committee Preparing Wildfire Legislation
At a House Science Committee hearing last week, Rep. Zoe Lofgren (D-CA) announced she is drafting legislation to “improve the understanding, prediction, and management of wildland fires through robust research initiatives.” Lofgren said another aim of the bill is to “enhance federal interagency collaboration and coordination to include science agencies in federal wildland fire response.” In a letter to President Biden earlier this year, Lofgren and 46 other members of Congress argued that existing coordination bodies “remain largely focused on land management and suppression operations and fail to incorporate research and development.” To inform the bill, the committee heard testimony on current research and coordination gaps. Meteorology professor Craig Clements noted the federal government does not provide as much support for fire weather preparedness as it does for other types of severe weather and recommended increasing funding for existing efforts, such as the Joint Fire Science Program, NASA’s Applied Science Wildland Fire Program, and wildfire grant programs at the National Science Foundation. Clements also called for creating a dedicated national fire weather research program and identified a need for “new comprehensive observational datasets that include weather, plume dynamics, and fire behavior observations.” The attention to wildfire science comes as the Biden administration has also spotlighted the topic. At an event last week with the governors of western states currently facing a deadly heat wave, Biden announced federal actions to combat wildfires and touched on observation and modeling efforts by the Department of Energy and National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.
NASA Picks Directors for Johnson and Kennedy Space Centers
Last week, NASA announced that it has selected Vanessa Wyche as director of Johnson Space Center in Texas and Janet Petro as director of Kennedy Space Center in Florida. Wyche has worked at NASA for 31 years and was Johnson Space Center’s deputy director before taking the helm as its acting director in May. Previously, she served as director of the center’s Exploration Integration and Science Directorate, managed multiple space shuttle missions, and held a number of other technical roles. She holds a bachelor’s degree in engineering and a master’s degree in bioengineering, both from Clemson University. Petro had served as Kennedy Space Center’s deputy director since 2007 before being named acting director in May. In that role, she helped the center transition to a multi-user spaceport, leading cross-agency initiatives to support commercial space operations. A graduate of West Point, Petro began her career as an officer in the Army and later held technical and managerial roles in the commercial aerospace industry.
NSF Names Next Head of Engineering Directorate
On July 1, the National Science Foundation announced that biomedical engineer Susan Margulies will take the helm of its Engineering Directorate on Aug. 16. Margulies will be the first biomedical engineer to lead the directorate, which has an annual budget of about $1 billion. Margulies earned a bachelor’s degree in mechanical and aerospace engineering from Princeton University in 1982 and her doctorate in bioengineering in 1987 from the University of Pennsylvania, where she later worked as a professor from 1993 to 2017. She currently chairs a biomedical engineering department that is shared by Georgia Tech and Emory University. Margulies replaces Dawn Tilbury, who stepped down from the position earlier this summer after leading the directorate since June 2017.
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Events This Week Monday, July 5
Federal Holiday (observance of Fourth of July holiday)
Tuesday, July 6
Wednesday, July 7
Thursday, July 8
Friday, July 9
Monday, July 12
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Opportunities DOE Seeking Fellows for Science Policy Roles
The Department of Energy is accepting applications for a fellow to spend one year supporting policy-related projects in its Office of Nuclear Energy and another fellow in its Office of International Affairs. Both roles are based in Washington, D.C. Applicants must be U.S. citizens.
RTI Hiring Innovation Policy Analyst
RTI International’s Center for Applied Economics and Strategy is hiring an innovation policy analyst to “support a broad portfolio of grant- and contract-funded research and analysis projects.” The analyst may start remotely but will be based out of Durham, North Carolina or Rockville, Maryland in 2022. Applicants should have at least a bachelor’s degree in a relevant field and at least five years of research experience, or a graduate degree and three years of experience.
CNAS Hiring for Technology and National Security Program
The Center for a New American Security is hiring fellows and research assistants for its Technology and National Security Program, which focuses on competitiveness policy relevant to emerging and foundational technologies. Position responsibilities include writing policy memos and leading panel discussions, depending on the level of the role. Applicants should have a graduate degree in a relevant field, such as security studies, engineering, or the sciences.
Know of an upcoming science policy event either inside or outside the Beltway? Email us at fyi@aip.org.
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