Advancing America's Networking and Information Technology Research and Development Act of 2013
Floor Speech
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Mr. LIPINSKI. Mr. Speaker, I thank the gen tle lady for yielding and for her work on this legislation. I'd also like to thank Chairman Smith and Chairwoman Lummis for all their work on this bill.
It's been nearly 4 years since we last reauthorized and updated the NITRD program, and it's time we get this job done. The House, again, on this bill has passed legislation since that time, but we need to get this done today here and get this through the Senate and to the President's desk.
The NITRD program evolved from the High Performance Computing Act of 1991, which funded the development of Mosaic--the first commercial Web browser which made the Internet user friendly and led to its explosion in the 1990s. This innovation was created by a team of programmers at the National Center for Supercomputing Applications at the University of Illinois.
As a brief aside, I was just at the NCSA in Urbana-Champaign at the University of Illinois for the launch of the Blue Waters supercomputer, one of the most powerful supercomputers in the world, which is also there at the University of Illinois. But Marc Andreessen, one of the lead programmers on the original project that created Mosaic and the founder of Netscape, summed up the importance of Federal investment in this research by saying:
If it had been left to private industry, it wouldn't have happened, at least, not until years later.
Innovative breakthroughs like the Mosaic Web browser changed our everyday lives and established the United States as the world leader in networking and information technologies, and the Federal Government played an important role in that. But today we find ourselves in a world in which we can no longer take U.S. supremacy for granted. As we heard during committee consideration of the bill, China, Japan, Germany, and several other countries are increasing their investments in NIT R&D as well as their capacity to convert R&D into new commercial technologies. We must prioritize cutting-edge, large-scale R&D and effective technology transfer policies, focused on the most advanced areas of network and information technology, in order to preserve our lead in these sectors.
H.R. 967, the Advancing America's Network and Information Technology Research and Development Act, achieves these ends through the development of a coordinated Federal R&D investment strategy. This bill requires Federal agencies involved in the R&D program to develop 5-year plans specifying near- and long-term objectives and to assess and evaluate progress periodically to ensure we maintain U.S. leadership in these fields.
Mr. Speaker, this legislation will focus our scientific community towards the innovative, large-scale, and collaborative R&D we need to remain a leader in networking and information technologies. This is a good, bipartisan bill, and I urge my colleagues to support it.
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