Select Cloud Investments in the FY 2025 NITRD Supplement to the President’s Budget

At some point every calendar year the National Science and Technology Council, a part of the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy, publishes a supplement to the President’s upcoming fiscal year budget request for the Networking and Information Technology Research and Development  Program (NITRD) and the National Artificial Intelligence Initiative Office (NAIIO). The budget supplement is divided into Program Component Areas (PCAs) and Interagency Working Groups (IWGs) and generally concerns investment in cutting-edge technologies. Cloud computing is often cited as an enabler for investments in advanced analytics, large scale computing, and other areas.

The latest NITRD supplement came out on November 27. It contains insight into some of the ways that NITRD agencies are considering cloud for R&D activities. Some of these “use cases,” for lack of a better term, describe pending or ongoing investments that might be of interest to industry.

Today’s article summarizes a few of these proposed investments and comments on the likelihood that agencies will still make them after the new administration comes into office on January 20, 2025. The opinions offered are mine alone, based on publicly-available information on the new administration’s likely priorities.

Changes in Overall Agency Budgets, FY 2024 to FY 2025

First off, the supplement lists an increase of $30M at the National Nuclear Security Agency’s (NNSA’s) Office of Defense Nuclear Nonproliferation to support the development of a hybrid on-premises and cloud compute infrastructure for the “blue/red-teaming of a wide range of state-of-the-art open source and industry AI systems.” This investment suggests a need for contracted engineering services in addition to the cloud capability, probably either Platform-as-a-Service or Infrastructure-as-a-Service, that will be required for the infrastructure. Also look for a potential investment in commodity buys, such as servers, etc., for the on-premise portion of the infrastructure. This investment is likely to proceed under the incoming administration.

Large Scale Networking (LSN) IWG

LSN IWG strategic priorities enable cloud infrastructure enhancements from the core enterprise to the tactical edge, including standards and guidance for the adoption of cloud computing. Under the LSN IWG, the National Science Foundation (NSF) will continue its ongoing investment in CloudBank, a capability that allows “the computer and information science and engineering research community access public compute clouds where appropriate.” No dollar figures are available for what the NSF intends to spend. This investment is likely to receive approval.

Advanced Wireless R&D (AWRD) Sub-PCA and Wireless Spectrum R&D (WSRD) IWG

The AWRD “includes federal spectrum-related R&D investments that promote the efficient use of wireless spectrum through advanced technologies and systems. Investments under this sub-PCA are coordinated by and reported under the WSRD IWG.” One of the investments listed is the NSF’s Resilient and Intelligent Next-Generation Systems (RINGS) program. RINGS is an effort being coordinated by the NSF, but it also includes the Department of Defense (DOD), the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST), and nine companies used for contractor support. The objective of RINGS is to “accelerate the lab-to-market translation of innovative research outcomes in academic and government labs to successful products and services [by supporting] “dynamically varying demands for data processing, dissemination, and storage, often in a distributed user-to-edge-to-cloud context.” No dollar figures were included. This program could be allowed to proceed.

High End Computing (HEC) IWG

The “HEC IWG coordinates federal R&D to enhance U.S. advanced computing capabilities and explore fundamentally new approaches to computing, focused on bolstering U.S. dominance in high-capability computing.”

Listed among the HEC IWG investments is the National Discovery Cloud for Climate (NDC-C), an effort for which the NSF is seeking $30M. The NDC-C “will federate access to compute resources from multiple sources, including NSF-funded advanced computing resources, edge resources located at NSF major facilities, and at other compute- and data-intensive NSF research facilities, as well as commercial cloud computing resources.

Given statements previously made by President Trump, I’d expect the incoming administration will immediately subject all budget requests submitted by the outgoing administration to scrutiny, with the result that many program budgets, particularly those related to climate change, could be cut before a new budget is put into place. This same process occurred in 2017 when the first Trump Administration came into office. The NDC-C investment is therefore likely to be cut before it has the chance to proceed.