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April 16, 2015

Ranking Member Johnson’s Statement on the Majority’s COMPETES Legislation

(Washington, DC) – Yesterday, Chairman Smith introduced H.R. 1806, his version of the American COMPETES Reauthorization Act, and scheduled a full Committee markup of the bill for Wednesday April 22, 2015. Democratic Committee Members and staff saw the bill text for the first time just last night, at the same time as the general public. The Committee has held no legislative hearings on the bill text and no subcommittee markups are scheduled to consider the text. Instead, the bill is headed straight to full Committee markup a little more than four business days after its introduction.

Ranking Member Eddie Bernice Johnson (D-TX) said the following.

“To put it simply, I am very disappointed. Just one year after the scientific community expressed its overwhelming opposition to the Majority’s two partisan authorization bills, the FIRST Act and the Department of Energy Research and Development Act, bills that were so bad they were never even brought to the House floor, the Chairman has decided to combine them into one appalling bill and call it an America Competes Reauthorization. The original America Competes Act was one of the crowning achievements of the Science Committee. This bill is an America Competes bill in name only. It does nothing to further our scientific and innovation enterprise.

“There are many, many problems with this bill – far too many to enumerate here. To give an indication of some of the most egregious issues, the bill:

  • Keeps overall R&D funding in the bill flat – simply adds funding to accounts the Majority favors at the expense of those it doesn’t.
  • Cuts social, behavioral, and economic (SBE) sciences by 45% from the FY 2015 appropriated levels and cuts geosciences by 8%. NSF is the primary source of federal support for SBE sciences, which represent less than 4% of the total NSF budget. The Geosciences directorate at NSF, in addition to funding climate science, has a broad portfolio that includes ocean sciences, natural hazards research, space weather, and the polar programs. Both of these directorates fund research essential to our national and economic security and overall well-being.
  • Fails to fully fund the agency’s operations account, putting into severe jeopardy the cost and schedule of NSF’s new headquarters being built in Alexandria, Virginia as well as NSF’s ability to fill urgently needed positions and to upgrade its IT systems to improve agency accountability and efficiency.
  • Includes a misguided and potentially dangerous attempt to impose a level of political review on NSF’s gold-standard merit-review system, thus encouraging researchers, peer-reviewers, and NSF program officers alike to play it safe, discouraging high-risk research and out-of-the-box thinking that is essential to the progress of science.
  • Bars the results of any DOE-supported R&D activity from being ‘used for regulatory assessments or determinations by Federal regulatory authorities’ which could essentially ban the EPA or FERC from using the most up-to-date research results when they set rules to protect our air, land, and water and prevent health hazards to our children and elderly associated with fossil fuel use.
  • Cuts Energy Efficiency and Renewable Energy (EERE) R&D ­­by almost 30%, or $496 million, below FY 2015 appropriated levels, and cuts ARPA-E by 50%, or $140 million, below FY 2015 levels. EERE and ARPA-E are both essential to our efforts to help secure our nation’s energy future.
  • Prohibits DOE from continuing to support a joint initiative with the Department of Defense and the Department of Agriculture to establish a cost-competitive drop-in biofuels production capability for military and commercial applications.”

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