A massive bill to bolster U.S. innovation took a big step toward becoming law this week after a bipartisan coalition of senators defeated an attempt to strip away most of its research components.
The latest version of the U.S. Innovation and Competition Act also includes new language requiring the National Science Foundation and the Department of Energy to allocate their research dollars more evenly across the country.
The Senate passed USICA in June 2021, with the support of 19 Republicans. In February, a bill with similar goals, called America COMPETES, passed the House of Representatives, although only a single Republican supported it. That triggered negotiations between the two bodies to reconcile their differences.
One big selling point for the Republicans was the bill’s provisions requiring greater geographic, racial, and institutional distribution of research dollars by NSF and DOE’s science office. The goal remains, but the language has been changed from what the Senate passed last year to address concerns by many researchers that it was too prescriptive.
The new language in CHIPS-plus retains a quota but revises how the money will be allocated. Instead of giving it to EPSCoR itself, which doles out its own grants to help states build research capacity, NSF and DOE were ordered to bump up how much money flows to institutions in those states through their regular process of making competitive awards.
The bill’s language recognizes that those targets may be a stretch. Both agencies are told to do so “to the maximum degree possible,” and if NSF falls short, the director must explain why and offer a plan to close the gap. Senator Maria Cantwell , who led the Senate contingent negotiating the terms of the compromise legislation, defends the importance of greater geographic distribution. “You don’t want there to be holes in our research enterprise,” she toldthe day after the vote. “You never know where that next big thing, or the next Bill Gates, is going to come from. So, the key is to build capacity across the country.
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