COMPETES Act Reauthorized

Earlier this week, President Barack Obama signed the reauthorization of the COMPETES Act, extending the federal competitiveness initiative that provides funding for numerous science, STEM education and commercialization programs. Though the final bill represents a significantly scaled-back version of the legislation passed in May by the House, the final version will allow the programs introduced in the COMPETES Act to continue for another three years. The reauthorization also includes a new regional innovation program to award competitive grants for activities relating to the formation and development of regional innovation clusters.

The 2007 America Creating Opportunities to Meaningfully Promote Excellence in Technology, Education and Science (COMPETES) Act authorized $43 billion in new federal spending over three years to support research and STEM education. In order to enhance U.S. scientific competitiveness, the legislation put several federal research agencies on a path towards doubling their budget authorizations, including the National Science Foundation (NSF), the Department of Energy's (DOE) Office of Science, and the laboratory activities of the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST). The bill put a particularly strong emphasis on energy research as a key to U.S. competitiveness, creating the DOE ARPA-E energy innovation program.

Earlier last year, the House passed an $84 billion reauthorization bill (see the June 9, 2010 issue of the Digest) that would have bolstered the initiative with strong support for its associated energy programs. Last month, however, the Senate approved a much less ambitious bill, pared down to a three-year, $43 billion extension, limiting funding for ARPA-E and not including investment in DOE's Energy Innovation Hubs. The final bill also exorcised any mention of the clean energy innovation consortium pilot program present in the earlier House bill. The consortium would have supported public-private clean energy research partnerships and clusters.

Despite these cuts, many science and TBED organizations applauded the reauthorization, citing the continuing value of its funding increases for research. Research agencies would remain on track to double their budgets under the legislation, although this would occur over ten years, instead of the seven year path undertaken in the original COMPETES bill. ARPA-E would be funded at $300 million a year over the next three years.

The Department of Commerce would house a new Office of Innovation and Entrepreneurship charged with developing policies to accelerate innovation and advance the commercialization of U.S. research and development and coordinating Commerce innovation initiatives. These inivatives would include a new Regional Innovation program that would support regional innovation strategies, including cluster-based initiatives and science or research parks, a pilot program to promote high-end computing simulation and modeling by small manufacturers and federal loan guarantees for innovative manufacturing technologies. NIST's Hollings Manufacturing Extension Partnership (MEP) would administer a green manufacturing and construction initiative for high-performance building standards. The bill also directs the administration to develop a national competitiveness and innovation strategy,

Actual funding levels for the act's provisions will depend on the decisions of appropriators over the next few months. The current continuing resolution extends the deadline for appropriations through March 4.

Read the text of the legislation at: http://thomas.loc.gov/cgi-bin/bdquery/z?d111:H.R.5116:. The Information Technology and Innovation Foundation provides additional details on the new aspects of COMPETES at: http://www.itif.org/publications/itif-statement-congressional-passage-america-competes-act.