The future the deficit the federal budget.

• Author: Barlas, Stephen

When Rep. Bart Gordon (D-Tenn.) introduced his America Competes reauthorization bill in April, he had high hopes for the bill's easy passage in the U.S. House of Representatives. The bill increased spending on research programs at three federal agencies and departments, and was designated a "key vote" by at least three business groups, including the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, which hoped it would eventually add up to new jobs and new products for American companies.

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Gordon thought his bill, H.R. 5116, threaded the political needle: Business support meant Republicans would fall into line, increased federal spending meant Democratic support. But instead of threading that needle, Gordon jabbed himself with it.

Republicans and even some Democrats took immediate issue with the $96-billion price tag at a time the federal deficit was projected to hit $1.3 trillion.

Gordon's reauthorization bill pumped up budgets for programs at the Departments of Energy and Commerce and the National Science Foundation at a rate of 8 percent to 10 percent a year over a five-year period. He topped that off with new spending on new programs, some of them seemingly duplicative of existing programs in each place.

The annual cost of Gordon's bill was $17.2 billion a year, compared to $8 billion a year for the original bill passed in 2007. (A month after introducing the bill and facing deficit headwinds, Gordon was forced to cut its price tag by 10.2 percent.)

The 2007 bill was passed in response to a 2005 National Academy of Sciences committee report, Rising Above the Gathering Storm, which said the U.S. industrial/exporting/high-paying job sector "appears to be on a losing path."

Three years later, not much had changed. "There is disturbing evidence that our overall innovation lead has not only been lost, but that we are continuing to rapidly lose ground," says Robert D. Atkinson, president of the Information Technology and Innovation Foundation.

New programs in Gordon's bill--such as Energy Innovation Hubs and Energy Frontier Research Centers--could be viewed as "excessive." For instance, the Advanced Research Projects Agency-Energy, the new energy program authorized in the 2007 bill, was meant to reproduce the results of the Defense version, called DARPA. But it barely got off the ground because of Congress's refusal to appropriate funds for it.

But when that $86-billion bill went to the House floor on May 19, Republicans offered what is called a "motion to recommit," which lopped $40 billion by cutting some new programs and freezing spending. It passed by a vote of 292 to 126, the margin in part reflecting inclusion of an amendment--which would have been hard to vote against--authorizing firing of federal employees who look at pornography on taxpayers' time.

The Democratic House leadership then pulled the bill off the floor, found a parliamentary way around the pornography amendment, and brought the $86-billion bill back to the House floor on May 28 when it passed by a vote of 262-150, with some Republican support. Sen. Jay Rockefeller (D-W. Va.), chairman of the Senate Commerce Committee and sponsor of the Senate version of America Competes, has made it clear that the House bill is unaffordable.

The debate in the House and now the Senate over the America Competes reauthorization illustrates how concern over the federal budget deficit is strewing rocks in front of all sorts of key business-favored legislation that would have had a smooth ride through Congress just a few years earlier. But business groups are responsible for some of the bumps.

On the one hand, groups like the...