Comprehensive Science Legislation to Become Law

The House of Representatives accepted a stripped-down Senate version of the America COMPETES Act, a bill to strengthen research, education, and innovation at several federal agencies.

Now the bill will go to President Barack Obama for his signature. But looming fights over the discretionary budget may make the legislative success a Pyrrhic victory. The sharply partisan nature of the debate on the House floor -- only 16 of 146 Republicans supported its passage, along with all 212 Democrats who voted -- signaled that the new Republican House leadership won't take kindly to bills that promise large increases in federal spending, no matter how worthy the cause. That attitude bodes ill for the likely impact of COMPETES, which puts Congress on record in support of steady increases in the budgets of the National Science Foundation (NSF), the basic science programs at the Department of Energy (DOE), and the National Institute of Standards and Technology. The bill also creates new programs aimed at enhancing science and math education, advanced manufacturing research, and regional innovation and mandates better coordination of them by the White House. And it tweaks the rules governing existing activities, from the fledgling Advanced Research Projects Agency-Energy at DOE to long-running training programs at NSF, with the goal of getting a bigger economic payoff from federal investments.

COMPETES doesn't actually provide any money for any agency. That can has been kicked down the road into the next Congress because legislators couldn't agree on the 2011 budget in their current lame-duck session. But that didn't stop Republicans from railing against the increased "spending" authorized in the bill, which would allow up to $46 billion for those agencies over the next 3 years. And that's after the House accepted Senate changes that sliced the last 2 years off a 5-year authorization and dropped several new programs. Republicans also complained that the bill, which the full House passed in a different form in May and which was vetted by a Senate panel in July, was being crammed down their throats.