House Elects New Speaker; Little Progress Made on FY 2024 Appropriations Bills
The House of Representatives, which had been without permanent leadership for the last three weeks, elected a new Speaker of the House. Congressman Mike Johnson (R-LA), a relatively junior member of Congress, was nominated by his fellow House Republicans to lead after a string of several nominees were unable to earn enough votes to become elected Speaker. Partially due to his relatively low profile, Speaker Johnson secured the support of both the moderate and conservative wings of the Republican Conference and was elected in a party-line vote.
Speaker Johnson laid out his goal of passing a continuing resolution (CR) that would avert the ongoing federal shutdown threat prior to the November 17 deadline and extend current funding levels to either January 15 or April 15 to allow additional time to negotiate a final spending package. While there have been instances of final spending levels remaining unfinalized past December in recent years, it’s unclear if Senate Democrats will be supportive of a plan to push the deadline into the new calendar year or will prefer to aim for a December deal. A CR extending into Calendar Year 2024 will trigger an automatic one percent cut to federal agency budgets; although such a cut could be reversed by passage of a final spending package, it may force agencies to delay issuing new awards or launching new programs.
NSF Launches New Program on Research Infrastructure
The National Science Foundation’s (NSF) Directorate for Social, Behavioral, and Economic Sciences (SBE) launched a new program, Research Infrastructure in the Social and Behavioral Sciences (RISBS). RISBS supports the development of research infrastructure, in the form of computational and data tools, to enable research in the social and behavioral sciences. The RISBS program accepts proposals at any time. RISBS also intends to support co-funding efforts with other SBE programs. According to NSF, “RISBS does not support research by principal investigators except in service of creation of the infrastructure.”
In addition to soliciting new proposals, RISBS provides an umbrella for three existing social science research infrastructure programs at NSF: the American National Election Survey, the General Social Survey, and the Panel Study of Income Dynamics. RISBS may also house other major social science infrastructure efforts in the future. The RISBS program page also highlights the NSF Human Networks and Data Science (HNDS) program that supports research into the behavior of individuals and groups “by leveraging data and network science and the development of data infrastructure that makes such work possible.” The program page for RISBS can be found at https://new.nsf.gov/funding/opportunities/research-infrastructure-social-behavioral-sciences.
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