President Obama’s fiscal year 2013 budget proposal calls for a significant boost in funding for the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) with the aim of supporting advanced manufacturing research and help reignite a crippled industry with technology support.

The budget proposal, released Monday, calls for $857 million, an increase of $106.2 million, or 14.1%, compared to FY 2012–an increase that is considered unusual given the cutbacks that most agencies have had to embrace in the coming fiscal year.

More than half of the proposed increased funding would be focused on advanced manufacturing research both at NIST laboratories and through a new industry-led consortia program. The overall request for advanced manufacturing research across all agencies is $2.2 billion for just this one program. ( A fact sheet is available at:
http://www.nist.gov/public_affairs/factsheet/manuf_innov2013.cfm.)

“We want to work with the private sector to ensure U.S. manufacturers have the research support they need to make the best products in the world,” said NIST Director Patrick Gallagher (pictured above).

“Through our laboratory programs and our standards development efforts, we can help American industry be agile, innovative and competitive,” he added.

“In very difficult times, we feel this is a very strong scientific and research budget.”

Gallagher noted that Obama underscored the importance of regenerating manufacturing in his recent State of the Union address.

“We have a huge opportunity, at this moment, to bring manufacturing back. But we have to seize it,” Obama said.

In its budget documents, NIST said, “Delivering technical support to the nation’s manufacturing industries as they strive to out-innovate and out-perform the international competition has always been a top priority at NIST.”

The biggest piece of the NIST request is $648 million to fund NIST’s laboratories that are developing the measurements, data and technologies to further innovation and industrial competitiveness.

Among its proposals: a $10 million increase to support the communications network and an $8 million increase for a national strategy for trusted identities in cyberspace. The $8 million would be used to fund pilot project grants for the private sector to work with state, local and regional governments to improve trusted IDs.

The communications funds would be used to help businesses work more efficiently. “To compete effectively in this global business environment, communities and companies will need reliable, secure access to huge amounts of data,” NIST said in its budget documents.

A separate proposal in the American Jobs Act would provide NIST with up to $300 million for a Wireless Innovation Fund.

The fund would ratchet up help for public safety personnel by creating better communications networks. It will help develop cutting-edge wireless technologies for public safety users. NIST would partner with industry and public safety organizations on research, development and demonstration activities aimed at new standards, technologies and applications that will advance public safety communications.

The idea is to build a seamless and interoperable broadband system that allows first responders and other public-safety personnel anywhere in the nation to reliably send and receive data, voice and other communications to save lives, prevent casualties and avert acts of terror.

“In very difficult times, we feel this is a very strong scientific and research budget,” said John P. Holdren, director of the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy as he described the administration’s proposals for NIST and two other science agencies.

He underscored the importance of continuing support for research and ways the federal government is dealing with these austere times.

“We are getting a lot of efficiency out of our folks, doubling up of jobs when someone leaves. The travel budget has taken a huge hit,” he told reporters at a briefing on Monday.

Whether the funds the White House requested will actually materialize, of course, remains doubtful, with this year being a presidential election year coupled with the partisan bickering and Republican vows not to approve any of Obama’s measures – fiscal and anything else.