Subcommittee Reviews NITRD Program
(Washington, DC) – Today, the House Committee on Science, Space, and Technology’s Subcommittee on Research and Science Education held a hearing entitled, “Oversight of the Networking and Information Technology Research and Development (NITRD) Program and Priorities for the Future.”
The NITRD program is a multi-agency research initiative designed to ensure continued U.S. leadership in computing systems, advanced networking, software, and other information technologies. The program has developed the computing and networking infrastructure needed to support leading edge research and to drive technology forward for a range of commercial applications that have the potential to benefit society broadly.
Ranking Member Dan Lipinski (D-IL) said, “The NITRD program evolved from a federal program established under the High Performance Computing Act of 1991. That Act provided the funding that led to the development of Mosaic in 1993, the World Wide Web browser that made the Internet user-friendly and led to its explosion in the 1990s. I am proud to note that Mosaic was created by a team of programmers at the federally funded National Center for Supercomputing Applications at the University of Illinois. Netscape founder Marc Andreeson, who was a leader of the Illinois team before launching his company, was quoted as saying, ‘If it had been left to private industry, it wouldn’t have happened, at least, not until years later.’”
Mr. Lipinski continued, “It is without question that that Act set the stage for a coordinated federal R&D and investment strategy that has underpinned U.S. leadership in networking and information technology over the past two decades. But today we find ourselves in a different world, in which U.S. leadership in NIT can no longer be taken for granted, and we need to think carefully about how we set priorities under difficult budget conditions. I also worry that we could be training students for jobs that end up being outsourced. So I want to ensure that we are focusing our education and training resources within NITRD on job skills that will be in demand here in the U.S.”
Democratic Members and witnesses stressed the importance of federal investments in IT innovation, citing many examples in addition to the World Wide Web of networking and information technologies that have transformed our lives just in the last ten years.
In the 111th Congress, the Committee held hearings on NITRD that led to the introduction of H.R. 2020, the Networking and Information Technology Research and Development Reauthorization Act. It sought to prioritize and strengthen information technology activities across the federal government. H.R. 2020 was a bipartisan bill that passed the House by voice vote in May of 2009 and again as part of the COMPETES Reauthorization Act in May of 2010; however, the Senate never introduced a similar bill and dropped the House bill from the COMPETES Reauthorization Act.
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