Presidential Candidates Clarify Science Funding Stances
As a member of the Computing Research Association’s Government Affairs Committee (CRA GAC), I’ve been paying close attention to the technology agendas of the presidential candidates. (Actually, I am the chair of the GAC, though due to Peter Harsha’s amazing work, I do less chairing and more supporting. Peter is the director of government affairs for the CRA.) The CRA, via the GAC, is the go-to organization when the computing research community needs to weigh in on policy issues.
Both candidates released their technology agendas. The GAC blog has published a brief analysis. Roughly speaking, both candidates support the doubling of the NSF, NIST, and DOE Science budgets. My take: While it is easy to think gloomy thoughts about research funding, and indeed the situation looks dire for the next handful of years, in the longer term (5 years out and more) I remain cautiously optimistic.
Also very interesting is Science Debate 2008. This was started by a small group of people who wanted to steer the political debate in the direction of the key issues in science. They managed to gain the support of a large number of major science advocacy organizations, including the AAAS and the Scientists and Engineers for America Action Fund (SEA). One fairly cool project they took on was to identify 14 key questions (culled from more than 3,400 that were submitted) for the presidential candidates to answer. Senator Obama recently provided his answers, which I think look very good overall. Besides emphasizing the need to double the budgets for science research funding, Obama cites the need to support basic high-risk, high-return research and to tackle “grand challenges” in energy, health, information technology, and other areas.
Peter Lee @ September 1, 2008
Obama’s answer are quite satisfactory, however he remains silent on issues relating to opening avenues for international graduates. Perhaps he should take a leaf from Canada where they allow international graduates to work too.
[…] few weeks ago I reported that Obama had provided his answers to the Science Debate 2008 questions. McCain has now done the same, as reported by the CRA Computing Research Policy blog. Like Obama, […]