NSF requests $50M for IT

President Bush has proposed a $50 million information technology budget for the National Science Foundation for fiscal 2007, $1 million less than Congress appropriated for fiscal 2006.

NSF is undertaking a major IT infrastructure and office automation upgrade for which it budgeted $19.7 million for fiscal 2007. Foundation officials also requested $8.2 million for a new customer relationship management system, which the budget refers to as the Proposal, Review and Awards Management Integration System.

The NSF budget request includes $7 million for FastLane, the agency’s Web-based grant management applications; $5 million for IT security and disaster recovery programs; and $2.5 million for a new human resources management system to support NSF’s workforce assessment and development activities.

In a recent State of the Union address, Bush highlighted his $6.02 billion budget request for NSF-funded research, a proposed $439 million increase in spending on research and education in science and engineering. That amount includes a proposed $30 million increase in the budget for computer and information science and engineering research, particularly for cybersecurity research and education.

The proposed budget increase would support two NSF-funded Science and Technology Centers: the Center for Embedded Networked Sensing at the University of California at Los Angeles and the Team for Research in Ubiquitous Secure Technology at UC at Berkeley. The NSF budget also includes proposed spending for the design and preconstruction of the Global Environment for Network Innovations. The GENI project is an experiment to rebuild the Internet from the ground up to be more secure and robust.