I want to thank you for inviting me here this morning at this critical time for science and technology policy. In the next few months, Congress will be making decisions that could very well determine whether the U.S. maintains its technological dominance in the years to come. Needless to say, those decisions will be vitally important to the future of your industry, and I hope that your companies will play a more active role in the debate over research and development and related issues than you often have in the past.

Now, why do I see this as such a critical time? I assure you that I don't say this merely to set a melodramatic tone for this speech. I think we may indeed be at a pivotal point in our nation's history.

I say this for two reasons. First, the facts on the ground. I'm sure that most of you saw the front page article in The New York Times a week or so ago, prompted by the release of the latest edition of the biennial report, Science and Technology Indicators. This report, required by law, is put out by the National Science Foundation, and it gathers together in one place just about everything measurable we know about the health of U.S. science and technology.

And what the latest report showed, and what the Times emphasized, was that a number of the trends are worrisome.

When one looks at the performance of American pre-college students in math and science, the number of American students studying math and science and engineering in college and graduate school, our ability to attract and retain foreign students in those fields, the relative number of patents being filed by U.S. researchers - just to name a few areas of concern - all these trends seem to be going in the wrong direction.
Unfortunately, little of this is new. But the trends seem generally to be continuing and worsening, and that's troubling.

At the same time that we have this gathering storm, we have to contend with the tightest budgets we've had in years and the challenges posed by terrorism. And I think the way Congress chooses to handle the budget and the terrorist threat this year will likely set the pattern for the next several years of austerity. And while the budget for any single year is unlikely to have an irreversible effect on the U.S. scientific enterprise, an ongoing pattern will leave its mark.

So, what are some of the specific decisions Congress will be making that I hope that all of you will weigh in on?

First, funding for several critical R&D agencies. The Administration's budget proposes to increase basic and applied research spending by only half a percent, and even key agencies would barely keep up with inflation, at best. For example, the National Science Foundation would receive about a 3 percent increase, the Department of Energy's Office of Science about a 2 percent increase. This is not enough to sustain U.S. economic advancement over the long run.

I would note that the Congress has passed authorization bills that call for both these agencies to get substantially more. The President signed our bill two years ago that calls for NSF to double its budget over five years, meaning annual increases of about 15 percent. The stalled Energy Bill includes our language to increase the Office of Science by about 9 percent a year.

Now in this budget environment, those increases probably are unrealistic. But we need to try to get closer to those numbers. I should say that the Administration agrees that these are priority areas - and they do better than most domestic agencies in the budget proposal - but I think we need to work to find more funding for them. And that's far more likely to happen if your companies are helping to drive that point home.

The budget does include a health increase - in the neighborhood of 20 percent - for the laboratories of the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST), which, quite frankly, the Congress seriously mishandled in the appropriations for this fiscal year. NIST is not exactly as household word, but I don't think I have to explain to all of you how vital technical standards are to technological advancement and competitiveness. In addition, NIST is working on such crucial issues as computer security, biometrics, and voting equipment standards.

Congress cut the budget for NIST's laboratories last year - truly cut, to the extent that NIST has begun laying off scientists. This is not the way to treat the oldest federal laboratory, one whose scientists have been winning Nobel Prizes in recent years and the one that works most closely with industry.

My highest budget priority is restoring funding for NIST, and we have had some success helping to put together an industry coalition to push for that. We're working closely with the appropriators, who seem willing to look more favorably upon NIST in the coming year. But it's going to take a lot more work to defend NIST once the tough choices imposed by the budget actually start being made.

I hope we will also be able to find funds to restore the Manufacturing Extension Program, which the Administration would level fund at a fraction of its historical level, and the Advanced Technology Program, which the Administration proposes to eliminate. These are good programs that can improve our nation's competitiveness.

The one science agency that is slated to see a major increase in the Administration budget is NASA. The President has proposed a 5.6 percent increase for NASA, bringing funding to $16.2 billion, to begin to fund the new exploration vision. I should note that the new vision, in its early years, mostly involves continuing the Shuttle and Space Station programs, which account for about half of NASA's budget and for about 85 percent of the proposed increase for fiscal 2005.

The proposed budget cuts some space science initiatives, earth science and aeronautics to start paying for the vision.

Now, I support the President's exploration vision. I agree that we should fly the Shuttle until 2010, complete the space station, develop a new vehicle to get to the moon and beyond, and return to the moon, hopefully by 2020. But I think we can do all that in a more sustainable way than has been proposed. So I would like to see NASA get a smaller increase in 2005 and to redistribute some of that increase.

That would free up some money for other science agencies, enable NASA to continue more of its own science programs, and allow the exploration program to move forward at a more deliberative pace, which would make it more successful and sustainable over the long-run. Discussions with the Administration about this are ongoing.

The decisions we make on NASA this year - in both authorization and appropriations bills - are clearly going to set the pattern for years to come because they will involve concrete future commitments. I urge all of you to weigh in on this crucial issue.

I should add that you've got more time than usual to do so. Congress is so deadlocked that, sadly, we are unlikely to make much progress on appropriations until after the November elections. That doesn't mean that you should wait to get started; it just means you have more time to have an impact.

Now, so far, I've just talked about spending, but there are other issues that will, of course, have at least as far-reaching an effect. One that I view as especially critical is U.S. visa policy. I am a senior Member of the Intelligence Committee, so I understand well the terrorist threat and the need for care in deciding who to admit to our nation. But I also understand that the U.S. has always been, and continues to be, dependent on attracting the best scientists and engineers from around the world. We need to strike the right balance, and we're not doing that right now.

In fact, our current policy, is good for neither security nor science. By not being selective enough in deciding which visa applicants to subject to greater scrutiny, we not only discourage the students and scholars we need from coming to our shores, we fail to focus in a way that will keep out the applicants we need to block.
I think the visa issue is the single most important science policy issue before us today. Unlike spending decisions, which will have a slow, cumulative effect, the visa decisions we make now will have an immediate effect that will be hard to reverse. Already, there are indications that we are discouraging students from applying. Foreign enrollments are down. This not only hurts us, it helps the nations where these students and scholars will study and work instead of the United States.

This is a tough issue - finding the proper balance is not a trivial matter - and it's especially tough for Congress because the problem is not one of statute, but involves the everyday practices of the State Department, the Department of Homeland Security and the FBI. All we can do is constantly oversee and nudge.

We've been doing that on the Science Committee, holding several hearings on the subject and sending the General Accounting Office out to determine whether the government is meeting its own goals for visa processing times. It is not. And by the way, the government doesn't even keep the statistics it should to get a handle on what is happening.

The Administration is responding to the concerns being expressed by the scientific community and the Congress. The situation is improving, a little. But much more needs to be done. We can't let anti-terrorism policy make us weaker.

I've talked so far about problems because setting an agenda is about solving problems. But let me close on a more positive note by talking about some of the things that we on the Science Committee have been able to accomplish over the past few years.

I said when I became chairman that I wanted the Committee to handle a broad range of issues, not just space, and to weigh in on matters that were of importance to the Congress as a whole, and I think we've done that. I mention this to make sure you're aware of the breadth of our interests and will come to us - continue to come to us in some cases - when we can be of help.

Some of our proudest achievements, in addition to the NSF Authorization Act I mentioned earlier, include our work on the Homeland Security Act, in which we created the Science and Technology Directorate, which was not in the original proposal, and added to the emphasis on cybersecurity. The Cybersecurity Research and Development Act, in which we set up new programs at NSF and NIST to work on what had been a largely overlooked and underrated problem. The Nanotechnology Act, which the President signed last winter, that made nanotechnology a major emphasis in federal research and set up a mechanism to coordinate and focus that research.

We're working now on a bill to revitalize high performance computing, and tomorrow morning we have a hearing with Dr. Marburger, the White House science advisor, and some of the leading lights in computing and computational science from industry and academia.

I was one of the people who helped get NSF started on the supercomputer center program back in the 1980s, and I want to be sure that the U.S. keeps its lead in that field and that our researchers have access to the fastest machines.

I still remember Nobel laureate Ken Wilson testifying in the early '80s that his students sometimes had to go overseas to get access to the best computers. That's not a scenario we want to see recur.

So we are going to be continue to be active, to fight for science funding, to make math and science education a priority, to ask tough questions about science priorities, to make sure we try to nip bad trends in the bud.
But to be effective we need your help. We need to know what you're worried about, we need your advice, and we need your political clout. If we don't work together now, we're going to be working together on crisis management in the future.

Thank you.