ARPA-E Director Majumdar Resigns

Posted on May 9, 2012October 17, 2012

Today, Acting Undersecretary and ARPA-E Director Arun Majumdar announced that he will be resigning his role as Acting Undersecretary effective immediately, and Assistant Secretary David Sandalow has been chosen as his replacement. Furthermore, Dr. Majumdar also announced that he will be resigning his role as Director of ARPA-E effective June 8, 2012, and ARPA-E Deputy Director Eric Toone will take over leadership of the organization.

Dr. Majumdar came to Washington, DC two and a half years ago tasked with setting up the Advanced Research Projects Agency – Energy, a new agency in the Department of Energy to fund projects that will develop transformational technologies that reduce America’s dependence on foreign energy imports; reduce US energy related emissions (including greenhouse gasses); improve energy efficiency across all sectors of the US economy and ensure that the US maintains its leadership in developing and deploying advanced energy technologies.

Dr. Majumdar has successfully accomplished the task put forth by the Obama Administration, to establish America’s first agency dedicated to catalyzing energy breakthroughs to secure America’s future. With ARPA-E now in its third year and a solid leadership team in place, Dr. Majumdar feels that it is an appropriate time to step down to be with his family in California. He will cherish the time he spent serving his country at ARPA-E and the Department of Energy and hopes that his work has helped lay the foundation for ARPA-E and America’s energy future. He would like to thank the Obama Administration, Energy Secretary Chu and his colleagues at the Department of Energy and ARPA-E for their dedication, constant support and the enriching experience.

This Week in Congress

Posted on April 16, 2012October 17, 2012

Congress is back in session today after a two-week break for the Easter holiday. Appropriators in both chambers will begin moving FY 2013 annual appropriations bills this week. The House Appropriations Committee on Wednesday will start marking up its spending bills for FY 2013 with a goal of cutting federal spending by a little more than one percent, or $15 billion. Senate appropriators, on the other hand, will begin their markups with a slightly more generous target that would still keep annual discretionary spending relatively flat. Senate subcommittees begin the process on Tuesday with the Commerce-Justice-Science and Transportation-Housing and Urban Development measures. The House Energy-Water subcommittee will meet Wednesday and the Commerce-Justice-Science panel is expected to meet Thursday. Under House rules, the draft bills will be made public 24 hours in advance of the markups; the Senate does not have a requirement for an early look.

Appropriators have yet to announce plans for writing the massive Labor-HHS-Education spending bill, which is always among the last and most controversial funding measures to move. The bill faces an additional challenge this year with the pending Supreme Court ruling on health care reform due in June. House appropriators might wait until after the ruling to move the bill. Meanwhile in the Senate expects the court will uphold the law and plans to write its spending bill assuming health reform will remain intact.

Tuesday

The Senate Appropriations Committee will hold subcommittee markups of its Commerce, Justice, Science FY 2013 spending bill and its Transportation, Housing and Urban Development FY 2013 spending bill.
The Senate Armed Services Committee will hold a subcommittee hearing on the health and status of the Department of Defense science and technology laboratories and enterprise.

Wednesday

The House Appropriations Energy and Water Subcommittee will mark up its Energy and Water Development FY 2013 spending bill.
The House Energy and Commerce Committee will hold subcommittee hearings on budget and spending concerns at the DOE and FDA User Fees 2012: How Innovation Helps Patients and Jobs.
The House Science, Space, and Technology Committee will hold subcommittee hearings on NSF Major Multi-User Research Facilities Management and Growing the Wireless Economy through Innovation.

Thursday

The House Homeland Security Committee will hold a subcommittee hearing on the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) and DOE National Labs: Finding Efficiencies and Optimizing Outputs in Homeland Security Research and Development.
The House Science, Space, and Technology Committee will hold a subcommittee hearing on Impact of Tax Policies on the Commercial Application of Renewable Energy Technology.
The American Chemical Society will hold a Capitol Hill briefing on Cybersecurity and Smart Infrastructure: Ensuring Resilience and Deterrence.

FY13 Budget Supports Research, Student Aid

Posted on February 17, 2012October 17, 2012

The Obama Administration’s FY13 budget, released on February 13, reflects a continuing commitment to increased federal investments in research and education. The budget would increase funding for the National Science Foundation (NSF); the Department of Energy’s (DOE) Office of Science and ARPA-E; and the Agriculture and Food Research Initiative (AFRI) in the Department of Agriculture, which supports competitive research. It also would provide a modest funding increase for the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH). Similarly, funding for basic research at the Department of Defense (DOD) is essentially level despite significant cuts elsewhere in the agency.

Funding for the National Institutes of Health (NIH) would be essentially frozen at the FY12 level. The science portfolio at NASA would be cut by more than three percent.

For student aid, the Administration would fully fund the maximum Pell Grant level of $5,635 and extend the 3.4 percent interest rate on subsidized Stafford loans, which otherwise would rise to 6.8 percent on July 1, 2012. Additionally, the Administration would shift campus-based aid programs, such as Perkins Loans, toward institutions that “keep their tuition and tuition increases low,” enroll relatively high numbers of Pell-eligible students, and provide “good value.” No additional details are available on exactly how the Administration would implement this.

The FY13 budget also contains several tax proposals of interest to research universities. These include making the American Opportunity Tax Credit permanent and limiting the value of certain tax expenditures, including the deduction for charitable contributions for individual taxpayers, to 28 percent. The budget would also expand the Build America Bonds program by making the program permanent, expanding eligibility to both government entities and nonprofit institutions—including both public and private universities—and expanding the allowed uses of the bonds.

FY13 President’s Budget Request

Posted on February 13, 2012October 17, 2012

The President is scheduled to deliver his FY13 budget request to Congress later this morning, kicking off the annual budget and appropriations season. While the details of the budget have remained under wraps until today, the Office of Management and Budget (OMB) released a 2013 “Fact Sheet” on Friday revealing that the budget will include strong support for research and development, including “$140.8 billion for R&D overall; increase the level of investment in non-defense R&D by 5 percent from the 2012 level, even as overall budgets decline; maintains the President’s commitment to double the budgets of three key basic research agencies (National Science Foundation, Department of Energy’s Office of Science, and National Institute of Standards and Technology Laboratories); expands and makes permanent the R&D tax credit. [Includes] Level funding for biomedical research at NIHNational Institutes of Health ($30.7 billion); and to get more out of the money, proposes new grant management policies to increase the number of new research grants by 7 percent.”

The President will also request $4 trillion in deficit reduction over the next decade in his FY13 budget, but his proposal to pay for it with revenue increases and spending cuts — already rejected by the special deficit reduction panel last fall — will make it tough to sell to Congress. Half of the deficit reduction would come by increasing revenues, including raising $1 trillion over 10 years by increasing taxes on families earning more than $250,000. Obama’s proposal would cut the deficit to $901 billion by the end of FY13, or about 5.5 percent of the gross domestic product. All told, his proposal would reduce accumulated debt by $3 trillion in addition to the $1 trillion in savings over 10 years already put in place by the BCA. If approved, Obama’s plan would void the automatic across-the-board cuts— known as a sequester— due to kick in January 2013.

Once the budget request is delivered to the Hill, both the House and Senate canCures Acceleration Network begin the annual appropriations process. The usual first step in that process is for both chambers to approve a budget resolution, which gives appropriations committees their top-line numbers on how much to appropriate. This year, however, Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-NV) has announced that he won’t move a budget resolution to the floor, even if the Senate Budget Committee approves one, since the Budget Control Act (BCA) approved last August already specified the top-line number for FY13. In the House, Budget Committee Chairman Paul Ryan (R-WI) will move a budget resolution through his committee, which will likely specify a top-line number even less than what was agreed to in the BCA.

DOE Reports on Tidal & Wave Energy

Posted on January 18, 2012October 17, 2012

The Department of Energy today released two reports assessing US ocean wave and tidal energy resources along the US Coasts. DOE reports that the two assessments, combined with ongoing analyses of technologies and other resource assessments, show that water power, including conventional hydropower, and wave, tidal, and other water power resources, can potentially provide 15 percent of our nation’s electricity by 2030.

The reports are the most rigorous assessments thus far undertaken by DOE and its collaborative partners, including the Electric Power Research Institute (EPRI) and the Georgia Tech Research Corporation.

The DOE reports may be accessed here:

“Mapping and Assessment of the United States Ocean Wave Energy Resource”

“Assessment of Energy Production Potential from Tidal Streams in the United States”