Congress cutting budgets of SEI, IDA, MITRE

[world!srctran@uunet.uu.net (Gregory Aharonian)]

>From the August 9, 1993 issue of Electronic Engineering Times, page 22

	Congress is poised to cut the budgets of Pentaon-funded research
centers.  Both houses have recommended reductions in the $1.4 billion
budgets of the 13 FFRDCs.  The Senate moved to reduce funding by 6 percent
and impose a pay freeze to save another 6 percent.
	Senators were said to feel an "increasing frustration that these
guy's budgets were going up when everybody else's was going down". 
Industry opposition to diversication of FFRDCs focuses on what critics 
see as their expansion into professional and technical services.  
	Major software FFRDCs targeted for budget cuts include MITRE, IDA,
and the SEI.  Officials from those organizations said only that budget cuts
would result in additional layoffs
	"Some of the centers do some good work, but the question is have
they strayed from their original mission", a Congessional analyst asks in
a report released in June.  While generally critical of the FFRDCs record,
the report concluded that they may off some advantages over private
companies since the centers are restricted in performing outside research.
	Senate sources said funding for FFRDCs could be cut even deeper in
the defense appropriations bill expected in the fall.  The only question 
now, Senate sources say, is how deep the cuts will be and how they will be
distributed among the centers.  The betting is that the bigger centers
will absorb most of the cuts, one source predicts.
==============================================================================

   Given that the software-related FFRDCs have shown no initiative in 
raising and examining the issue critical to Ada's health and the hypocrisy
of its non-use inside the DoD, there will be some of us who loose no sleep
seeing the FFRDCs shrunk.  Much of the raw data I have been posting (minus
my obnoxious comments) should have been coming out of SEI, MITRE and IDA.

   I have a suggestion for SEI management.  When you start laying off, fire
all the people involved with the suppression of the SEI report whose data
undermines the rationale for the Ada Mandate, and whose data contradicts and
was ignored in SEI's followon substudy on Ada and C++.  Getting rid of
intellectual dishonest people is a good way to downsize.
-- 
**************************************************************************
 Greg Aharonian                                      srctran@world.std.com
 Source Translation & Optimization                            617-489-3727
 P.O. Box 404, Belmont, MA 02178