Peter Domenici, and Jeffrey Bingaman, introduced a bipartisan bill in October 1997 to double federal spending for nondefense scientific, medical, and precompetitive engineering research over 10 years (the bill, S.1305, is called the National Research Investment Act of 1998). In early 1998, Congressman Vern Ehlers of the House Science Committee initiated a national science policy study to review the nation's science policy and develop a new, long-range science and technology policy that is ''concise, comprehensive, and coherent'' (Ehlers, 1998).

The structure of federal support for computing and communications also underwent modification in the 1990s. In place of the FCCSET committee, the Clinton administration established a National Science and Technology Council in 1993 to coordinate federal programs in science, technology, and space. Its Committee on Computing, Information, and Communications (CCIC), through the subcommittee on Computing, Information, and Communications R&D, coordinates computing- and communications-related R&D programs conducted by the 12 federal departments and agencies in cooperation with academia and industry. This group has restructured and expanded upon the HPCCI to organize programs in five areas: (1) high-end computing and computation; (2) large-scale networking; (3) high-confidence systems; (4) human-centered systems; and (5) education, training, and human resources. Further, in February 1997, President Clinton established an Advisory Committee on High Performance Computing and Communications, Information Technology, and the Next-Generation Internet. The committee's charge is to assist the administration in accelerating the development and adoption of information technology that is vital to the nation's future (NSTC, 1997).

Federal support for computing and communications infrastructure also changed in the 1990s. After opening the Internet to commercial use in 1992, NSF effectively privatized the network in 1995. Nevertheless, NSF and other federal agencies are pursuing development and deployment of the Next-Generation Internet (NGI), which will boast data rates 100 times those of the Internet. The NGI initiative will create an experimental, wide-area, scalable testbed for developing networking applications that are critical to national missions, such as defense and health care. Further, starting in December 1995, NSF began restructuring its support of national supercomputing centers, forming a new Partnerships for Advanced Computational Infrastructure program. The program will concentrate its resources on two groups of organizations, each with a leading-edge facility and several collaborators. One group, the National Partnership for Advanced Computational Infrastructure will have the San Diego Supercomputing Center in California as its leading-edge site. The other group, the National Computational Science Alliance, will have the National Center for Supercomputing Applications at Urbana-Champaign,