The America COMPETES Reauthorization Act of 2010 — a flagship proposal for U.S. innovation and competitiveness containing critical funding authorization for ARPA-E, Energy Innovation Hubs, clean energy STEM education, science R&D budgets, and more — was blocked on the House floor yesterday due to political point-scoring over a small and unrelated pornography issue.

“Six newly proposed programs encouraging science research and technological innovation are casualties of Thursday’s House fight over porn,” reports The Hill.  According to Science Insider, “members voted 292 to 126 to block passage of a 5-year authorization bill that would have provided healthy increases in the research and education budgets of the NSF and research programs at the Department of Energy and the Department of Commerce.  Instead, a bipartisan majority voted for a 3-year freeze on the budgets for those agencies; it also cut all funding for DOE’s new Advanced Research Projects Agency-Energy.”

Congressman Bart Gordon, Chairman of the House Science & Technology Committee and COMPETES champion, stated in his press release, “I’m disappointed that politics trumped good policy. The Minority was willing to trade American jobs and our nation’s economic competitiveness for the chance to run a good political ad.”  The COMPETES Act was originally passed with strong bipartisan support in 2007 to implement several of the recommendations from the definitive national competitiveness report, “Rising Above the Gathering Storm.”

Congress is playing petty politics with our economic security, and it couldn’t come at a worse time. The blockage of America COMPETES comes when our international competitors — especially countries like China — are making rapid advances and investing massively in science, technology, and innovation, especially in the clean energy industry.  If Congress had behaved this way in reaction to Sputnik, we not only would have lost the space race, we would have lost in industries that helped power our growth for half a century.

“I believe in American leadership,” Gordon declared, “and I think COMPETES is too important to let die.  I would like to see it brought up again, but timing is unclear. Advocates for science, technology, manufacturing, and education — including the 750 organizations that endorsed COMPETES and their memberships — need to make their case to Members of the House and Senate why this bill needs to be signed into law.”

Stay tuned for more commentary next week, and see more coverage at Chronicle of Higher Education and Nature blog