Does the growing budget deficit constrain what Congress can do?
Certainly it does. In the president’s budget proposal, he had a freeze for domestic spending. Fortunately, within that freeze, he had an increase in the Competes area in terms of R&D. So other programs are going to have to go down, while our research and investment go up. This bill would reauthorize and build upon the America Competes Act of 2007. What’s one notable success of that law? We took the model of DARPA [the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency], the Defense Department’s high-risk, high-reward agency, where the Internet was developed, and put it in the Department of Energy, as ARPA-E. Its purpose is not to have incremental improvements in energy technology but transformational ones, and with a very small bureaucracy—right now there are only 16 people there. The idea is to coordinate the best and brightest in the public sector, private sector, national labs, [and] universities, in particular areas. In their first request for proposals, they received something like 3,700 i
