House Eliminates Funding for ATP

Before Congress left for its August break, the House voted 217-210 to pass the Commerce-State-Justice Appropriation Bill. Among other items, the Bill (H.R. 2670) eliminates all funding for the Advanced Technology Program (ATP). With this zeroing-out of funding for ATP, NIST’s total appropriation would be $436.7 million, $300.3 million below the request of $735.0 million, and $210.5 million below FY1999 funding of $647.2 million.

The House Appropriations Committee report submitted with the bill says that after many years in existence, ATP has not produced a body of evidence to overcome fundamental questions about whether the program should exist in the first place. Given the tremendous financial constraints under which the Committee is operating, the Committee concludes that funding would be better spent on other higher priority programs and recommends that the ATP program be terminated.

This decision coincides with House Science Committee Chairman James Sensenbrenner, Jr.’s (R-WI) announcement that the General Accounting Office (GAO) has released a draft report showing that ATP reforms designed to ensure federal grants are not displacing private capital still have not been implemented.

Specifically, according to Sensenbrenner, GAO found that for the FY 1999 grant competition, ATP applicants were asked to describe why full private funding is not available and to describe their efforts to secure internal funding as well as external private funds. However, the GAO draft report says that program officials stated that ATP would not immediately disqualify an applicant if the applicant did not complete the new section as long as the rest of the application was in order.

Chairman Sensenbrenner stated, “I’m deeply discouraged by the GAO’s finding. Year after year administration officials assure Congress that ATP has been reformed and federal funds are not being wasted. Yet we now find applicants are in good standing regardless of whether they comply with the new application requirement - making the whole reform exercise a sham.”

The Clinton Administration has called the series of appropriation bills passed in recent weeks a decimation of the federal R&D budget (see related article in the 8/13/99 issue of the SSTI Weekly Digest.)



The Senate has also passed its Commerce Appropriations Bill, S. 1217. In the Senate version the Committee recommends $226,500,000 for ATP for fiscal year 2000. This amount is $23,000,000 above the fiscal year 1999 appropriated level, but $25,000,000 below the fiscal year 2000 request. The level provided by the Committee for the ATP Program would fund fully the requested level of $137,600,000 for awards created in fiscal years 1996, 1997, 1998, and 1999 and will make $73,000,000 available for new awards in fiscal year 2000.

The NIST appropriation bills now await House-Senate conference when Congress returns in September. The draft GAO report that Sensenbrenner cites is not currently available to the public.



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