Political Quotes

“I thank the gentleman for yielding. Madam Chair, I rise in opposition to this amendment which would eliminate the EPSCoR program. For more than 60 years, the National Science Foundation has provided academic research funding to colleges and universities around the Nation, and it has been critical to ongoing research that is essential to maintaining our competitive edge in scientific advancement. The NSF's Experimental Program to Stimulate Competitive Research, commonly known as EPSCoR, is an authorized program whose mission is to help balance the allocation of NSF and other Federal research and development funding to avoid the undue concentration of money to only a few States. This successful program has had a profound impact on my home State of Rhode Island, allowing nine of our academic institutions to increase research capacity, to enrich the experience of their students, and to contribute to advances in a variety of fields. Currently, 25 States, including Rhode Island, and 3 jurisdictions account for only about 10 percent of all NSF funding, despite the fact that these States account for 20 percent of the U.S. population. EPSCoR has helped to stabilize this imbalance in funding and should continue to do so in the 2016 fiscal year and beyond.…”