Deal’s Impact on Texas Operations Remains Unclear

If you follow college sports, you know all how strong rivalries can be between certain schools. Bragging rights after a football game spill over into competitions over everything. Those that cross neighboring state borders seem to have even more edge sometimes.

 

While legislators did not agree to all of Gov. Linda Lingle’s Innovation Initiative – including a $100 million innovation fund - some of the governor’s original concepts emerged from several other bills at the close of the 2007 legislative session last week.

 

In an era in which many companies maintain a web presence before their first technology hits the market, broadband access has become an essential ingredient for high-tech business and growth. In many states, however, the need for broadband access has widened the high-tech achievement gap between urban and rural areas.

Region Looks to Broadband Access and IT Usage

The Delta Regional Authority (DRA) lacks the access, awareness and affordability of broadband Internet service – a direct bearing on the region’s ability to participate successfully in the national and global economies, a new report from DRA and the Southern Growth Policies Board finds.

 

A continuing concern of many TBED organizations is the departure of university graduates from their communities, leaving at various stages of their lives and taking their talent and education with them. The resulting "brain drain" from this exodus leaves many states with the frustration of paying the costs to educate its citizens, but not reaping the benefits of an educated workforce.

Manufacturing firms come in all shapes and sizes. Little ones. Big ones. Ones that need more labor from their employees to assemble components. Ones that need more R&D from their employees to design products.

 

Last week’s release by the National Science Foundation (NSF) of the results of the 2005 survey of academic R&D expenditures reveals the nation’s investment in research through its universities and colleges rose 5.8 percent in fiscal year 2005. Academic research expenditures for FY 2005 totaled $45.75 billion.

 

Are you thinking about making a career change? If so, visit the SSTI Job Corner at http://www.ssti.org/posting.htm.



In addition to the new opportunities described below, the SSTI Job Corner has openings for these positions:

When one looks beyond the first few pages of many sections of the agencies’ fiscal year 2008 budget request summaries, the mental concept of a television rerun appears. As SSTI staff pored through the budget this week, several found ourselves saying, “Didn’t we read the same thing last year?”

In fiscal year 2008, President Bush proposes $11.42 billion total to support the American Competitiveness Initiative (ACI) across the National Science Foundation (NSF), Department of Energy’s Office of Science (DOE SC), and the Department of Commerce’s National Institute of Standards and Technology laboratories (NIST).

In this year’s State of the Union Address, President Bush announced that his FY 2008 budget request would contain funding to support research to eliminate the projected growth of automobile carbon dioxide emission within 10 years.

The Administration request of $89 billion for the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) budget is predicated on passage of the Administration’s version of the 2007 Farm Bill proposals. As designed, the Administration's 2007 farm bill proposals would spend approximately $10 billion less than the 2002 farm bill spent over the past five years, according to the USDA press release.

The Administration's FY 2008 discretionary budget request for the Department of Commerce (DOC) is $6.55 billion, a decrease in discretionary spending of $76 million from the FY06 appropriation. The department’s full-time equivalent staff would increase by 4,700 people between FY06 and FY08.

 

Funding for every DOC program or office supporting state and local TBED and traditional economic development programs would be cut deeply or proposed for elimination.

 

The Administration’s FY 2008 budget request for the Department of Defense (DoD) totals $481.4 billion, an 11.3 percent increase over FY07. [Note: DoD’s FY07 appropriations bill was one of only two passed before the current fiscal year began. As a result, SSTI is able to provide comparisons between the FY08 request and the FY07 appropriations. Variance between FY08 request and FY07 appropriations is provided in parentheses.]

 

According to the U.S. Department of Education (ED), federal funding represents only 8.9 percent of America’s spending on elementary and secondary education during the 2006-07 school year. That share in FY 2008 would be $56 billion according to the Administration’s budget request for the agency.

The Department of Energy (DOE) budget request for FY 2008 totals $24.3 billion, a 3 percent increase above the FY07 request.

The lion’s share of the $697.3 billion FY 2008 budget request for the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) is allocated towards Medicare (55.4 percent) and Medicaid (29.0 percent) spending.

The Administration’s FY 2008 budget request for the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) totals $46.4 billion in funding, an increase of 8 percent over the FY 2007 request. The key priority of this year’s request is a $13 billion initiative for border security and immigration enforcement.