Tough Appropriations Hearing for NIST
New NIST Director Ray Kammer took some heat as he testified in front of House Commerce Appropriations Chairman Harold Rogers (R-KY) on March 11. Rogers, known to be harsh at times with NIST witnesses, did not spare Kammer.
Kammer presented NIST’s $715.0 million request for FY 1999, an increase of $42.1 million over FY 1998 funding. The request would maintain the NIST labs’ world leadership in measurement and standards, allow for new general and focused competitions within the Advanced Technology Program (ATP), support existing Manufacturing Extension Partnership centers, and fund facility construction and renovation. For FY 1999, $40.0 million is requested to begin construction of the proposed Advanced Measurement Laboratory (AML). The request asks for an additional $115.0 million in advance appropriations (appropriations that would only be available for spending in future years) for fiscal years 2000-2002 for the AML, which Kammer said is expected to cost a total of $218.0 million and take 44 months to complete.
Noting that the Administration proposes to pay for the NIST funding increases with revenues from a tobacco settlement, Rogers immediately challenged Kammer: “Suppose [the tobacco funds] don’t show up?” Kammer responded that in his understanding, if a tobacco settlement was not reached, funds could be taken from the projected budget surplus. Rogers countered that President Clinton had designated the surplus to go toward fixing Social Security. “The offsets you’re proposing,” he said, “are not in the [purview] of this committee to make happen.... So what are we to do?” Those decisions are made by the White House and the Office of Management and Budget (OMB), Kammer answered. “That’s above my pay grade.”
Rogers added that the committee faced a tight FY 1999 budget situation due to the expected ramp-up in funds for the Commerce Department’s year 2000 census, and stated the committee would either have to “deny the increases you’re requesting or cut other programs. What can we cut within NIST, then?” Kammer reported that “the actual programmatic expansion is $92 million,” but NIST had already found $50 million in internal offsets (mainly from construction, based on getting an advance appropriation for the AML), leaving only a requested increase of $42 million. Rogers responded in exasperation, “If I’ve told you one time, I’ve told you 100 times: we don’t do advance appropriations here.... Yet you continually come up here and make a plea based on advance appropriations.”
Kammer said he had “hoped for a dialogue [and] hoped to be persuasive.” “You’re half right,” Rogers replied; there was a dialogue, but “you’re not going to be persuasive.... You’re hiding behind a gimmick that allows you to not make hard choices. If you want something, you’ve got to give up something.... It just means we have to throw the whole thing in the wastebasket and come up with our own scheme,” he said. “It’s tragic.”
When Ranking Minority Member Alan Mollohan (D-WV) asked why NIST could not request construction funds on a year-by-year basis, Kammer acknowledged that it would “certainly [be] consistent with the approach the chairman advocates.” Mollohan also queried Kammer about general versus focused ATP competitions, and asked for some “gee whiz stories” on program successes. Kammer explained that a general ATP competition was open to proposals in all areas. Based on the number of proposals in a single area and input from the private sector, ATP might determine that it would be useful to hold a focused competition to advance a particular area of technology. He cited, as an ATP success story, the achievement of 2mm tolerances in vehicle manufacturing, which economists estimated will save the industry $3 billion by 2000.
Rogers also expressed disatisfaction over funds left over from the FY 1998 ATP award process. Kammer said it meant the program was well managed if funds were left over because a project was finished ahead of schedule or under budget, or terminated because it was not working, but Rogers urged him to make better projections in future years of the amount of funding actually needed.
