House approves science authorization on third attempt

A House bill authorizing $85.6 billion in federal science research spending over five years passed on the third attempt May 28. The bill would give $44 billion between fiscal 2011 and 2015 to the National Science Foundation, $30.2 billion to the Energy Department's Office of Science, $4.3 billion to the Advanced Research Projects Agency-Energy and $5.4 billion to the National Institute of Standards and Technology.  

Passage of the bill, the American COMPETES Reauthorization Act, was previously in question after Republican parliamentary maneuvers to freeze funding at current levels appeared successful. A bill that would have authorized $47 billion for research failed May 19 after it didn't capture a two-thirds majority.  

The bill's primary sponsor, Rep. Bart Gordon (D-Tenn.) resorted to a maneuver of his own May 28 by dividing the contents of the bill into nine separate votes, a tactic known as division of the question (.pdf). Gordon is chairman of the House Science and Technology Committee.

Representatives thus rejected a Republican provision to authorize funding for only three years and to strike authorization for energy research centers (called "hubs" in the bill). They also voted to preserve language that will give small and medium size manufacturers loan guarantees for the use or production of innovative technologies.

They unanimously voted to keep a language originally proposed by Rep. Ralph Hall (R-Texas), the senior Republican on the science and technology committee, that would prevent money authorized by the bill from being spent on salaries for anyone disciplined for viewing pornography on a government computer.

The final vote on the bill was 262 to 150, with only Republicans voting against it.

The bill also restructures NIST, reducing to six from 10 the number of NIST labs. The Information Technology Laboratory would remain unchanged. Rep. David Wu (D-Ore.), the congressman behind the NIST restructuring, said NIST would "will be reorganized to better reflect the multidisciplinary nature of technology in the 21st century."

For more:
- see the THOMAS page on H.R. 5116
- see statements from Reps. Gordon, Hall and Wu

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