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On Nov. 30, 2020, the Energy Sciences Coalition, of which ASM is a member, issued the following statement on the fiscal year (FY) 2021 Energy and Water Development appropriations bills.

Dear Chairwoman Kaptur, Chairman Alexander, Ranking Member Simpson and Ranking Member Feinstein:

The Energy Sciences Coalition (ESC) thanks you for your strong, bipartisan support of the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) Office of Science in the fiscal year (FY) 2021 Energy and Water Development appropriations bills. As you begin work on a final FY 2021 Energy and Water bill, the ESC urges you to include no less than the House funding level of $7.05 billion for the DOE Office of Science. The DOE Office of Science is critically important in developing new energy technologies to achieve net zero goals, advancing Industries of the Future and maintaining a highly skilled science and technology workforce.

An FY 2021 funding level of at least $7.05 billion is needed to:

• Support core research in the physical sciences, biological sciences, advanced materials, geosciences, computing and engineering to help develop future energy technologies and fully utilize new and updated world-class facilities and cutting-edge instrumentation;
• Accelerate the construction and upgrades of world-class scientific user facilities and maximize operations to support more than 36,000 researchers from academia, industry and federal agencies in their science and engineering pursuits;
• Advance new, strategic investments in innovative high-risk, high-reward research areas, such as quantum science and technology, genomics and engineering biology, microelectronics, next-generation communications, and artificial intelligence and scientific machine learning;
• Maintain and grow multi-disciplinary centers focused on addressing scientific grand challenges, such as Energy Frontier Research Centers, Bioenergy Research Centers, Energy Innovation Hubs and national quantum information science research centers; and
• Prepare the next generation of American scientific and engineering talent through competitively awarded grants as well as education programs, such as the Office of Science Graduate Fellowship and Computational Sciences Graduate Fellowship programs.

For these reasons, we urge you to provide no less than $7.05 billion for the DOE Office of Science in FY 2021. The °®¶¹´«Ã½ States must maintain leadership in science, technology and innovation and the Office of Science plays a pivotal and leading role in addressing this country’s energy, national security and environmental challenges.

The Energy Sciences Coalition (ESC) is a broad-based coalition of organizations representing scientists, engineers and mathematicians in universities, industry and national laboratories who are committed to supporting and advancing the scientific research programs of the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE), and in particular, the DOE Office of Science.