The Cutting Edge: COMPUTING / TECHNOLOGY / INNOVATION : Funding for Some U.S. Technology Projects Is Threatened by GOP Cuts : Telecommunications: Korean Center in L.A. is one example of a program that may not have been without federal grant.
At the Korean Youth and Community Center in Los Angeles, work is almost complete on a video conferencing system that will enable local Asian-Pacific organizations to offer courses through UCLA at low cost.
The video instruction helps the center’s clients overcome cultural and linguistic barriers: “In distance learning, you’re using images and you can use other languages to help people who wouldn’t otherwise be able to get this information,” says Bong Hwan Kim, the youth center’s executive director.
But the project never would have happened without a $60,000 grant from the Commerce Department’s Telecommunications and Information Infrastructure Assistance program, one of a number of Clinton Administration initiatives aimed at assuring broad access to the so-called information superhighway.
And now that a budget-cutting Republican majority is ensconced on Capitol Hill, the future of such programs is uncertain at best. The Republicans have targeted applied technology as an area ripe for cutbacks--and the specific mission and ideological orientation of the many programs involved will be key factors in determining which ones survive.
Traditional science programs--including NASA and the National Science Foundation--are considered relatively safe, with most Republican leaders voicing support for the government’s traditional role in funding basic research. Military technology programs--which have long accounted for the bulk of federal technology spending--will also be preserved.
But when it comes to newer and more esoteric efforts to promote the information superhighway--or to fund promising technologies that have not for one reason or another gained backing from the private sector--Republicans are less sympathetic.
“The less government, the better for the superhighway. . . . Competition will make things like universal access a reality,” says Jack Fields (R-Tex.), the new chairman of the House telecommunications and finance subcommittee.
Competition, Fields and many others believe, will bring down prices and thus broaden opportunities. But this theory seems unlikely to make a lot of difference to organizations like the New Haven, Conn., youth center--recipient of a $203,495 grant to establish a computer learning center where low-income children, ages 7 to 14, will get an introduction to the Internet and other aspects of computer use.
The Telecommunications and Information Infrastructure Assistance program, budgeted at about $25 million this year, is not the only Commerce Department technology program that looks to be in trouble. Republican knives are out for the Advanced Technology Program, which gives grants for promising new technologies and has received a big funding boost from the Clinton Administration.
The technology program is criticized by many Republicans as “corporate welfare” by which the government is “picking winners and losers” among competing technologies. Yet other programs which could also be viewed as corporate charity appear poised to benefit from being on the right side of the ideological divide.
The Defense Department’s Technology Reinvestment Program, with an annual budget of $550 million, is a prime example. This program, designed to support so-called “dual use” technologies that have both civilian and military applications, counts among its beneficiaries a Silicon Valley group called Smart Valley Inc.
The nonprofit group received a $6-million grant from the Pentagon in 1993 for its flagship project, CommerceNet, which will help companies of all sizes reduce their costs of doing business by moving the activities they conduct by phone and fax onto a high-speed computer network.
But even Smart Valley Chairman Harry Saal readily acknowledges that his group could find other methods of funding if the government money went away. Smart Valley, he says, is really about private interests promoting cooperative efforts among local businesses, civic bodies, schools, universities and foundations to develop a new electronic community.
Without Commerce Department funding, though, programs like the one at the Korean Youth and Community Centers would languish. “No other funding could have enabled us to purchase this technology,” says Kim.
