NASA and the Competitiveness Initiative

One of the major programs announced both at the President’s State of the Union address and with the release of the FY07 budget proposal last week was something called the American Competitiveness Initiative, which is designed, according to an OMB fact sheet, “to double funding for high-leverage research emphasizing the physical sciences that will provide breakthroughs in information technology, nanotechnology, and other fields of science that will have significant impacts scientifically and economically.” However, as noted here earlier, while the initiative includes agencies like NSF and NIST, it does not include NASA. Why not?

At a Space Transportation Association breakfast on Thursday, Richard Russell, associate director of technology for OSTP, addressed that issue in the Q&A session. “When the President put together the American Competitive Initiative, we went through all the various agencies, specifically looking at long-term trends in physical sciences, and physical science research, and compared where various agencies were on that track, where fundamental enabling research was occurring that was directly linked to competitiveness, and where agencies might have been lagging behind other agencies in terms of the need for additional resources,” he explained. For example, the Department of Energy’s Office of Science was singled out as one that has had flat funding in recent years but supports a lot of government and private research in key areas.

“You’ll notice that we picked either complete agencies or complete pieces of agencies,” he said. “When we started looking at it that way, it was impossible to fit NASA into the proposal. Although NASA clearly does extremely high-quality basic research in the physical sciences, if you look a lot at where the research is, and what’s supporting it… it’s not necessarily directly supporting a lot of the other agencies that are working on things that will be long-term and be of commercial viability to the country. That’s not to say that NASA doesn’t do some of that work as well,” he said, but including all of NASA into the initiative didn’t seem viable to the administration.

An interesting thought not addressed by Russell at the breakfast: was their any thought of reorganizing NASA’s research programs so as to pool those efforts that met the administration’s criteria into a single department that could have been made a part of the initiative?