The following analysis was provided by Lewis-Burke Associates.
On August 9, President Biden signed the long-awaited competitiveness and innovation package that is one of the most comprehensive in decades. The bill passed with overwhelmingly bipartisan support, including almost all Democrats, 15 Republican Senators, and 24 Republican House Members voting in favor. The CHIPS and Science Act (CHIPS+) authorizes approximately $102 billion to advance major research initiatives at the National Science Foundation (NSF), Department of Energy (DOE), the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST), and the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA), creates a new bioeconomy research and development national initiative, and establishes Regional Technology Hubs. In addition, the bill appropriates $54 billion in funding for semiconductor research and development, manufacturing, tax incentives, and workforce development as well as advanced wireless innovation infrastructure and development. The authorized provisions did not come with appropriations and thus funding will need to come through regular appropriations or other special funding vehicles.
The legislation authorizes $81 billion for NSF over five years, growing annual authorized funding to $19 billion in fiscal year (FY) 2027. The House and Senate struck a balance between their visions of how much funding should be authorized for the recently-established directorate for Technology, Innovation, and Partnerships (TIP) versus the rest of NSF, with existing NSF programs authorized at $65 billion over the five-year period and TIP authorized for $16 billion. Of the key technology areas included in the legislation, areas especially relevant to SIAM include artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning; high performance computing; disaster prevention and mitigation; biotechnology and synthetic biology; data management and cybersecurity; advanced materials science; and advanced energy and efficiency technologies. The legislation also includes similar national, societal, and geostrategic challenges that were first introduced in the House version and include national security; manufacturing and industrial productivity; workforce development and skills gaps; climate change and environmental sustainability; and inequitable access to education, opportunity, and other services.
CHIPS+ includes numerous policy provisions beyond authorization of the TIP directorate and several provisions that the SIAM Committee on Science Policy helped shape. These include a new process to improve planning for advanced computing resources and authorization of a program to boost recruitment, retention, and advancement of underrepresented minority faculty modeled on the ADVANCE program. In other policy provisions, major funding increases are authorized for specific programs such as midscale research infrastructure, graduate fellowship and traineeships, the Noyce teacher training program, and Cyber Corps Scholarships for Service.
Regarding STEM education, CHIPS+ will increase mentoring and other efforts to better support graduate students and postdoctoral researchers, increase support for minority serving institutions (MSIs) and other emerging research institutions, authorize a new AI Scholarships for Service program modeled on the current cyber-focused Scholarships for Service program, expand data collection on the STEM workforce, and authorize $60 million for a new Master STEM Teachers Corp Pilot. There are also several provisions related to specific areas of research, including: climate change; social, behavioral, and economic sciences; food-energy-water; sustainable chemistry research and education; mining; unmanned maritime and aerial systems; precision agriculture; astronomy and satellite constellations; microgravity utilization; risk and resilience; and support for biological research collections. Many of these research areas include specific references to the inclusion of modeling and computational efforts in NSF’s research activities.
The bill includes new requirements to increase research accessibility, accountability, and security. While the more controversial research security provisions for the academic and research community were not included in the final bill, several that did pass include requiring NSF to maintain a Research Security Office; authorization of a new National Security Data Service; development of online resources on risks and research integrity; supporting research on research misconduct and integrity; entering into an agreement with an independent research security and integrity information sharing analysis organization (RSI-ISAO); coordinating with the Director of National Intelligence to identify key technology areas that may lead to controlled unclassified or classified information; and restricting NSF funds to institutions of higher education (IHEs) that maintain an agreement with a Confucius Institute, unless granted a waiver. Additional research security provisions across agencies include requiring DOE to develop tools and processes to manage research security threats and requiring OSTP to publish uniform guidelines related to foreign talent recruitment plans.
The legislation authorizes additional funds and new activities for DOE. The centerpiece of authorized DOE investments would be $50.3 billion for the DOE Office of Science over the next five years. This would be a significant boost in funding for the Office of Science—from a $7.5 billion fiscal year (FY) 2022 enacted level to close to $11 billion by FY 2027. Additionally, SIAM priorities related to robust support for applied mathematics programs in the Advanced Scientific Computing Research (ASCR) program and partnerships across DOE are included in the legislation. If realized through appropriations, this funding would boost core research in the physical sciences, help maintain and operate the largest collection of world-class scientific user facilities, expand STEM workforce programs, and lead efforts to advance emerging technologies like quantum information science and AI.
Read the full analysis of this legislation from Lewis-Burke Associates, SIAM’s federal relations partner, here.