ACRL College & Research Libraries News

College & Research Libraries News

Washington Hotline

Rick Weingarten

More cash for college

The Administration’s proposed FY99 budget was released February 2. U.S. Secretary of Education Richard Riley commented that this proposed budget will “… give all Americans the financial support and information they need to go to college.”

For higher education, the budget proposal would include $7.6 billion for Pell grants, an increase of $249 million that would raise the maximum Pell award from $3,000 to $3,100. Also included is a $70 million increase for College Work-Study, which includes additional work-study tutors for the America Reads initiative.

Library programs, for which funding is passed through the Department of Education to the Institute of Museum and Library Services, is proposed at $146 million, about the same level as FY98. Another initiative in the Department of Education would develop a $75 million Teacher Training in Technology program, which would include schools of education and other partnerships to train new teachers in uses of technology.

In addition to the funds for tutors included in the College Work-Study program, the Administration’s budget would include $250 million for America Reads, “which supports local programs that provide tutoring and help improve reading instruction in our schools …”

Currently before Congress is the Reading Excellence Act, H.R. 2614, which has passed the House and remains to be acted upon in the Senate. Also outstanding is an approved appropriation of $210 million to be used for a children’s literacy initiative, if legislation is approved before July 1.

Next Generation Internet initiatives

One important area for academic librarians in President Clinton’s proposed FY99 budget is the Next Generation Internet (NGI) initiatives. Undeterred by problems with last year’s NGI appropriation, which, with the loss of the domain name funds (see below), fell significantly short of the President’s $105 million request, the new science budget called for an increase in NGI funding to $110 million. The agency breakdown is as follows:

The Senate Commerce Committee recently introduced a bill authorizing NGI, S. 1609. The bill has bipartisan support, having been introduced by Bill Frist, (R.-Ten- nessee) chair of the Science Subcommittee; Jay Rockefeller (D-West Virginia) vice chair of the subcommittee; John McCain (R-Ari- zona); Fritz Hollings (D-South Carolina); Conrad Burns (R-Montana); and John Kerry (D-Massachusetts). Reports are that the administration, which had been considering submitting its own legislation, is pleased with the bill, which takes a fairly narrow approach that the committee hopes would lead to rapid consideration and passage. The House Science Committee, which typically takes the lead in science authorization issues, has not decided whether they would have their own bill to consider.

HPCC renames initiative

On the High Performance Computing and Communication front, the HPCC initiative has been renamed “Large Scale Networking and High-End Computing and Computation.” Overall program funding is proposed at $850 million. Last year’s HPCC request was $1,128 billion, so funding would be substantially down. But given the renaming, and presumably redefinition of the program, it is hard to draw a meaningful line between the FY98 and FY99 numbers until we get further information.

Frozen funds

Meanwhile on the litigation front: a Federal Court froze the National Science Foundation’s (NSF) use of $23 million in funds collected by Network Solutions through fees for domain name registration. A lawsuit has been filed challenging the fees as an unlegislated tax. The judge, while not deciding on the case itself, has ruled that there is enough merit in the charge to warrant freezing the money in dispute. NGI is affected because those funds were designated by congressional appropriations to be used for NSF’s NGI activities. The $23 million was $12 million above the original NSF request, and, therefore, represents lost opportunity. Unless the agency can reallocate funds, however, the loss of the other $11 million will cut sharply into the base funding for networking at the agency.

For further information about NGI and related programs, contact Rick Weingarten at the ALA Washington Office at (800) 941- 8478, or e-mail at rww@alawash.org. ■

Rick Weingarten is senior policy analyst at ALA's Washington Office; e-mail: rww@alawash.org.