Be Careful What You Wish For
August 4th, 2006Posted by: Roger Pielke, Jr.
Democrats on the House Science Committee have been trying to get the Technology Administration in the Department of Commerce to release a report that Congress had requested and paid for on the impact of “outsourcing” on U.S. science and technology jobs. For some unknown reason, whether hardball politics or simply incompetence, Secretary Carlos Gutierrez ignored requests for release of the study, which was to be delivered in 2004.
Finally a few weeks ago, Science Committee Democrats were able to get the report they had been seeking, and have posted excerpts on their website. What does it contain that DOC or the Administration might want to hide? Not much.
My reading of the report finds the following two statements to be the most interesting, because they are counter to claims of a looming outsourcing crisis:
The effect of offshoring on the competitiveness of the US IT services and software sector appears to be negilible . . .
The present outsourcing and offshoring trends will increase the competitiveness of the U.S. semiconductor industry in the short term . . .
So what gives? The DOC report does provide some strong counter-evidence to the claims of an outsourcing crisis presented in the NRC report Rising Above the Gathering Storm, which has been used in support of a bipartisan push for more science and engineering funding in the name of competitiveness. Maybe the DOC report was being sat on so as not to provide a mixed message on competitiveness. After all, running on the issue of foreigners taking “our” jobs sounds pretty appealing. But I am skeptical about this explanation. After all, Democrats as well as Republicans like to run on the jobs issue and the DOC report doesn’t exactly help the Democrats cause (they clearly were looking for evidence that the Administration was hiding evidence of a mass exodus of jobs overseas). And surely there are also behind-the-scenes politics going on that may trump this explanation.
In any case, the Science Committee Democrats are to be applauded for wrestling the report that they paid for out of DOC. However, in the end it provides little help to their cause, and in fact contains data at odds to the recent bipartisan push on addressing U.S. competitiveness through more funding for research. It also suggests that the crisis in offshoring is not as bad as advertised, but this is a result not being told by either party.
August 4th, 2006 at 9:27 am
I agree that the data countering the arguments about underproduction of Ph.Ds and effects of outsourcing are basically ignored. But it doesn’t have to be ignored (nor should it).
For example, enrollments in IT majors have been declining, in part because of a perception that all the jobs are migrating overseas. When the Association for Computing Machinery (disclaimer, my current employer) released its report on outsourcing in IT, it demonstrated many of the same conclusions as the TA report. The organization then used that data to help support increased enrollment in IT fields (graduate and undergraduate).
For what it’s worth, the Technology Administration is a casualty of the American Competitiveness and Innovation Act – it will be eliminated if the bill is signed into law.
August 4th, 2006 at 9:38 am
David- Thanks! Do you know why the termination of the TA in the ACI?
August 4th, 2006 at 9:43 am
For clarification, ACM argued that the report’s conclusions, that all of the IT jobs were not going overseas, would support continued enrollment in IT fields.
August 4th, 2006 at 10:05 am
Looking at the conference report on the legislation,
“Section 502 would eliminate the Technology Administration and the Undersecretary of Commerce for Technology at the Department of Commerce, allowing the NIST Director to report directly to the Secretary. The FY 2007 budget request proposed funding the Technology Administration at $1.5 million. At this level, there is little likelihood that a robust program of analysis and advocacy would remain. The Committee believes that these resources could be more effectively used on other technology-related priorities.”
So there are two explicit reasons – making the NIST Director a direct report to the Commerce Secretary and finishing the killing of the TA the administration, the appropriators and/or authorizers started. Not having any Hill experience, I’m not well suited to read between the lines here. Perhaps Kevin V. or others could shed some light here.
August 4th, 2006 at 11:24 am
The administration is not likely to tell us who might have vetted or edited the report while it was held back, or why. I wouldn’t want to sound partisan, but isn’t this needless delay of a report emblematic of how the current administration hides and manipulates information?
An executive order in November 2001 enlarged the cloak of secrecy over presidential records; the administration has greatly increased the number of secret documents (in spite of a report led by Daniel Moynihan in the 1990’s that there were already far too many documents kept secret). The VP’s energy policy of 2001 was developed in secrecy, secrecy that was defended all the way to the Supreme Court. Aggressive editing of science reports at NASA also comes to mind.
And yet the administration reserves the right to declassify any information ad hoc, including names of CIA operatives.
And to the question of public understanding stocks and flows that you discussed in your post of 8-3-06, how educational is the administration’s recent statement that the deficit is lower than expected?
August 5th, 2006 at 7:21 am
I received some very thoughtful comments on this post from someone wishing to remain anonymous, some choice excerpts and summaries below:
“You have to keep in mind that a) this was a product of the [DOC] Technology Administration, which as comments to your blog point out is not much more than a handful of staff, and that b) the Department actually has several bureaus (NOAA, NIST, ESA) that apply much more rigor to reports than what is essentially a policy/advocacy shop, so perhaps a better explanation could be that once the draft report was subjected to broader and more rigorous review, it was determined to essentially be an assemblage of anecdotal [stuff]; not worthy of publication by a Department that puts out a variety of economic statistics and vigorous economic and scientific reports. Like most everything in Washington, this then got blown out of proportion.”
And
“You float one idea that this may have been sat on so as not to confuse messaging on competitiveness, but this repor; far predated the Gathering Storm and the launch of the President’s American Competitiveness Initiative.”
And
A suggestion that the report may have been motivated by 2004 congressional electoral politics related to a member or members that might have stood to gain from it.
And
A suggestion that this report has been caught up in the political tide and made far more of than it deserves, by both parties (Rs at the start, Ds at the end).
Thanks for the clarifications!
August 7th, 2006 at 1:54 pm
Digging through things a bit further, there’s one thing that jumped out at me.
Most of the press releases charting the kerfuffle over releasing this report mention the difference between the 12 page summary and the 200 page report.
The report available on the website is all of 46 pages. It seems like it’s just the Executive Summary, but I’ve got nothing to compare it to.