Will the new Congress be good for technology? Will its members put down their state-of-the-art cell phones and Blackberrys long enough to seriously consider legislation that will help U.S. industry be more competitive and perhaps even help strengthen the economy? “This Congress has a lot of unfinished business,” says Electronic Industries Alliance (EIA) President and CEO Dave McCurdy.
It may be a situation the new Democratic leadership may be ready to fix. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, accompanied by Congressman George Miller (Calif.), soon to be the chairman of the Education and Workforce Committee in the House, and Congresswoman Anna Eshoo (Calif.), who represents Silicon Valley, already have made the rounds at a few industry trade association functions to talk about her party’s push for competitiveness legislation early next year.
Pelosi expects strong bipartisan support. In her first post election meeting with President Bush, the new speaker reportedly explicitly mentioned competitiveness as one area where he could work with Congress. Bush introduced the American Competitiveness Initiative in his State of the Union address in January.
The Dems may also press for implementation of some of the security proposals that came out of the 9/11 Commission report on better protecting the country from terrorists. These include the installation of radiation monitors to screen cargo containers at all ports of entry and entry/exit screening systems using biometric passports linked to a database.
The biggest item on the industry’s political agenda is R&D tax credits. The EIA’s McCurdy says research is “at the top of the list” of his several hundred member companies.
“For the last two years, both sides of the aisle [of Congress] have been telling the high-tech industry they support extending the R&D tax credit,” McCurdy says. “Yet time and again, we’ve seen political gamesmanship trump sound public policy.”
The AeA (formerly the American Electronics Association) is making the same pitch.
“While other countries are aggressively courting R&D with lucrative tax benefits, the U.S. has allowed the R&D tax credit to expire for nearly a year,” says AeA President and CEO William T. Archey.
As a result, some deserving projects don’t get funded, or they’re moved overseas.
The AeA also has high hopes for support from the new Senate for improved education in math and science, an increase in the federal R&D budget, and visa reform.
High on the IEEE-USA’s political to-do list is keeping U.S. EEs employed. The IEEE’s Washington, DC-based lobbying group says legislation pending before Congress would authorize enough visas for highly-skilled workers to fill every computing and engineering job created in the United States over the next decade and still have 630,000 visas left over. This may kick start another hard look at immigration reform in high-tech jobs.
Reprints
)
