Funds sought for tech future

BY JIM PUZZANGHERA
Mercury News Washington Bureau
Posted at 12:04 a.m. PDT Thursday, September 2, 1999

Lobbying: Clinton aide and industry leaders ask Congress for seed money.

WASHINGTON -- As the 30th anniversary of the Internet's first heartbeat approached, high-tech leaders and a top Clinton administration official warned that Congress is being dangerously shortsighted in failing to pay for the type of federal research that helped bring the Information Age to life.

Spending bills working their way through Congress and the Republican majority's $792 billion tax-cut plan would sharply reduce proposed increases on basic research in information technology at a time when a presidential commission has declared that such funding is ``seriously inadequate.''

Republicans say their hands are tied by spending caps put into place by the 1997 balanced-budget agreement. But White House Chief of Staff John Podesta said Wednesday that President Clinton's proposed budget would increase civilian research and development money within those caps. He charged that Republicans have chosen to reduce that research and development funding by $1.8 billion -- or approximately 8 to 10 percent -- to help pay for other priorities, such as the large tax cut.

``And as if this year's cuts weren't devastating enough, the Republican budget and tax plans could reduce discretionary domestic spending by roughly half in the coming decades, inevitably leading to even further cuts in research and development,'' Podesta said in a speech at the National Press Club. ``This is a 19th-century budget for a 21st-century economy. It appears that these Republicans grew up watching too much Fred Flintstone and not enough Jetsons.''

Podesta reiterated Clinton's determination to veto the GOP tax-cut plan and asked that Republicans work with the administration to restore the research and development funding.

Origins of Internet

Defenders of such high-risk, long-term research point out that today's booming economy is being fueled in great part by one of those federally funded projects -- the Defense Department initiative started in the 1960s to hook up university researchers in a computer system now known as the Internet.

``The fact is, hundreds of billions of dollars are being generated because of that investment,'' said Vinton Cerf, senior vice president for Internet architecture and technology for MCI WorldCom and one of the fathers of the Internet. ``Now is the right time to make these investments when we have the type of surpluses we do.''

Without such investments, there might be no new information-technology advances to boost the economy 10 or 20 years from now, he said. Industry leaders said shareholders will not allow high-tech companies to do such long-term research, leaving the responsibility in the hands of the federal government.

High-tech lobbying

This week, high-tech industry and academic groups -- including the Palo Alto-based lobbying group TechNet -- have written to congressional leaders and the White House urging them to find a way to restore the information-technology money.

``Unless immediate steps are taken to reinvigorate federal research in this critical area, we believe there will be a significant reduction in the rate of economic progress over the coming decades,'' the co-chairs of the President's Information Technology Advisory Council wrote in a letter sent to 84 members of Congress.

Proposals to significantly increase funding for information-technology research have run into trouble in Congress, as have several other science and technology proposals made by the Clinton administration, such as funding for NASA space programs, a new generation of fuel-efficient vehicles and a controversial public-private research partnership called the Advanced Technology Program.

An administration proposal to spend $366 million more on information-technology research in the coming fiscal year -- bringing the total to $850 million -- has been cut by about $80 million so far as Congress prepared next week to continue appropriating money for various government agencies. And a $4.8 billion bipartisan proposal spearheaded by the Republican chair of the House Science Committee to nearly double federal information-technology research over the next five years has not yet come to a vote.

University research

Basic research money goes to universities and research institutions, helping them attract top faculty, leading to better-educated science and engineering students, said Ken Kennedy, a professor of computational engineering at Rice University in Houston and a member of the President's Information Technology Advisory Council.

``I, for one, find it astonishing at a time when information has delivered in part . . . the kind of budget surpluses we're seeing, that we're ready to reduce the long-term investment in information technology,'' Kennedy said Wednesday at a Washington news conference in which he, Cerf and others pressed for the funding.

Eric Benhamou, chief executive officer of 3Com Corp., said the investment in federal money the industry is seeking next year is not that much.

``Let's keep things in perspective -- $366 million is really a small amount of money with potentially enormous returns,'' he said.

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