By Tom Henderson
Small Times Senior Writer
June 28, 2001 — The Advanced Technology Program (ATP) at the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST), which once faced severe cuts, now is poised to get an increase, predicts a spokesman for Sen. Robert Byrd (D-W.Va.)
President Bush had proposed eliminating new grants for the ATP and asked that its budget for the 2002 fiscal year, which begins Oct. 1, be slashed from $145.4 million to $13 million. The program has funded high-risk, high-technology programs, including many in small tech, for more than a decade.
Bush also instructed U.S. Secretary of Commerce Donald Evans, whose department oversees NIST, to review ATP’s effectiveness.
But Tom Gavin, Byrd’s press secretary, said this week that not only would current funding be restored for 2002, “but there will be an additional $60 million for new projects, as well.”
He said a Senate appropriations subcommittee chaired by Sen. Ernst Hollings (D-S.C.) would approve the funding “as early as next month,” and that the full committee, chaired by Byrd, would approve it soon after.
“It is Sen. Hollings’ intention to restore those funds,” said Gavin.
He said he expected the funds to survive negotiations between Senate and U.S. House of Representatives conferees and be part of the budget that will be approved by Bush later this year.
“Does the program continue to meet the goal of long-term research? As you know, some people have charged that it is corporate welfare,” said Jim Dyke, a spokesman for Evans.
Hollings was the principal sponsor of legislation that gave birth to the ATP in 1988. Since then, the ATP has funded research by numerous small tech companies, including DNA sequencing, labs-on-a-chip, gas sensors and fiber-optic components.
In addition to the budget cuts for 2002, Bush had asked Congress on April 23 for permission to direct NIST to not spend $60.7 million that had already been funded for new programs in 2001.
The House agreed with Bush’s request but the Senate refused, leaving current funding in place. ATP’s support in the Senate got a huge boost on May 24, when Sen. James Jeffords of Vermont left the Republican Party to become an independent, giving control of the Senate to the Democrats.
Hollings became chairman of the Senate appropriations subcommittee overseeing NIST and ATP funding, and Byrd became chairman of the full Senate Appropriations Committee.
Last week, Hollings issued a news release in response to a National Research Council study of the ATP ordered by the Senate.
“This study is the most comprehensive review of the Advanced Technology Program to date, and the results have shown that ATP is meeting its intended goals,” said Hollings. “The ATP is an important investment in American economic competitiveness, and the technologies it helps develop will create the new industries and jobs of the 21st century.”
The ATP is reviewing its first batch of requests for grants for the current program that was announced Jan. 2. Last week, it awarded $1.99 million to BioTrove Inc., a biochip company based in Cambridge, Mass., and will announce award winners periodically through Sept. 30. A spokesman said they will average about $1 million each, and run for up to five years.
The ATP program was a favorite of former President Clinton’s. For years, Republicans have assailed it as corporate welfare. Until Jeffords’ switch, the review by Evans was seen as a mere formality by some, who said the ATP’s demise was a foregone conclusion.
Both Wired magazine and Technology Review, published by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, ran stories on the budget suspension in their June issues. Technology Review titled its story “End of an Era,” and wrote in its lead paragraph: “As President George W. Bush and Congress battled over tax cuts, an element of the president’s budget that some believe could have a much longer-term impact on America’s economic health went largely unnoticed.”
In Wired’s story, Raymond Kammer, a former director of NIST, was quoted as saying Evans’ review was “the fair trial before the hanging.”
WHAT IS NIST?
The National Institute of Standards and Technology celebrates its 100th anniversary this year. Originally named the National Bureau of Standards — it was the first nationally funded research lab in the physical sciences — its mission was to determine such things as the exact length of a second, how much power made up a volt of electricity and the precise volume of a gallon of water. (At the beginning of the 20th century, there were no fewer than eight different volumes called a gallon in various parts of the United States.)
Today, NIST, with a budget of $597 million in 2001, has gone far beyond nailing down that a gallon has 128 ounces. The agency, for example, has defined the meter as the distance light travels in a vacuum in one-299,792,458th of a second.
And it has evolved a research staff of 1,700 (out of a total staff of 3,200) that has also taken the agency far beyond its original mission. It has carried out a wide variety of leading-edge research, studying everything from nanocomputing to figuring out how to supercool a fluid to just billionths of a degree Kelvin above absolute zero, making it the coldest thing in the universe, to helping solve the riddles of DNA.
Along the way, its scientists also figured out how to make optical glass during World War II, replacing German-made supplies, invented devices that astronauts placed on the moon in 1969 to measure to the inch the distance between the Earth and its nearest neighbor, and won the 1997 Nobel Prize in physics for coming up with a way to tell time with a deviation down to one second every 20 million years.
They also came up with more mundane but useful things, such as a high-speed dental drill and closed captioning for the deaf.
In 1988, Hollings, fearful that the U.S. was losing its competitive edge to Japan and others, was the primary sponsor of the Omnibus Trade and Competitiveness Act of 1988, which created the Advanced Technology Program.
Though the first Bush administration approved the initial funds for ATP in 1990, some $10 million, it soon came to be seen as a favorite of the Clinton administration. In 1993, Clinton pledged to increase ATP funding to $1 billion, but failed to convince Congress to do so.
In 1995, members of Congress vowed to eliminate the ATP. But the program managed to keep its funding and will receive $145.4 million this year, which includes $60.7 million in new awards, and ongoing payments to previous award winners.
FRIENDS AND FOES
Critics of the ATP criticize its funding of DNA-related research by Motorola, a company with a market capitalization of some $60 billion. (Grants are generally matched on roughly a 50-50 ratio by the applying companies.)
“If we are against welfare for the poor, then we have to be against it for the big corporations,” U.S. Rep. Dana Rohrabacher (R-Calif.) has told reporters.
And James McGroddy, former head of research at IBM who helped start the ATP program, told Technology Review that with the explosion of venture capital in recent years, ATP has outlived its usefulness.
Maryann Feldman, an economist at Johns Hopkins University who has studied the ATP extensively, disagreed. Calling it “one of the most studied programs in the government,” she said it is “ironic to me that Mr. Bush felt this program needed more study. There’s a substantial body of information out there. Studies have been done internally, externally, by the government accounting office.”
She says that her own 1999 study of the ATP showed that it lived up to its “mandate that it will promote long-term, broad-based economic growth.”
Feldman said the ATP was started in response to fears America was losing its competitive edge during a bad economy. Now, she said, “we need to be reinvesting to insure we have continued economic prosperity. Without an investment in science, you’re not going to have economic growth.”
Feldman disputed the contention that venture capital has grown to the point where the ATP is no longer needed. “ATP serves as a very basic bridge to bringing academic research forward to the point where VCs might be interested in investing. VCs don’t make investments typically until a company is three years old or close to profitability.”
The ATP “is not interfering with the marketplace or having the government pick winners and losers,” said Hollings. “The ATP is without doubt the most market-driven technology program supported by the government. Industry, not government, proposes the specific projects to focus on. Industry, not government, runs the projects and contributes the majority of funds.”
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CONTACT THE AUTHOR:
Tom Henderson at [email protected] or call 734-994-1106, ext. 233.
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