National Science Foundation for the Future Act

Floor Speech

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Mr. FOSTER. Mr. Speaker, today we are considering H.R. 2225, the NSF for the Future Act; and H.R. 3593, the DOE Science for the Future Act. Both are tributes to the thoughtful bipartisanship of the leadership and the staff of the Science, Space, and Technology Committee, on which I have the honor of serving.

Last Congress, the Science Committee found itself in the remarkable position of discussing dueling bipartisan proposals to essentially double the science budgets, which, needless to say, represents a big change from years past.

Out of that shared commitment to the future came the thoughtful and bipartisan NSF for the Future Act and the DOE Science for the Future Act. These bills, which represent significant and overdue increases to the budgets for the NSF and the DOE Office of Science, are crucial to ensuring that our Nation maintains its leadership in the science that will continue to change the world.

H.R. 2225 was specifically written to ensure that the NSF will have the funds to accept a much larger fraction of the qualified research proposals that it receives every year, which is the single most important thing that we can do to ensure the health of the science it supports.

H.R. 3593 contains aggressive but feasible budget profiles for the existing programs of DOE's Office of Science. It has specific language to reexamine opportunities to expand these programs into new areas under these more ambitious but now, hopefully, realistic budget growth scenarios so that next-generation projects in fields like nuclear fusion, bioinformatics, energy storage, basic energy research, and much more can now be contemplated.

As the only Ph.D. physicist in Congress, I urge my colleagues to support these bills, which I am proudly cosponsoring, to provide our scientific researchers with the support that they need to lead us into the future.

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