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WASHINGTON With a small business innovation grant program favored by the Pentagon set to expire this month, Congress is racing to draft compromise reauthorization legislation that addresses concerns about companies abusing the awards process.

Democrats and Republicans on the Small Business committees in both the House and Senate convened a so-called four corners meeting this week to negotiate draft legislation, which is in its final stages.

Rep. Blaine Luetkemeyer, R-Mo., the ranking member on the House Small Business Committee, said Thursday that the committees hope to finish drafting legislation that reauthorizes the Small Business Administrations Innovation Research and Technology Transfer awards which are made jointly with 11 federal agencies by the end of the week.

Weve got a general agreement already with the four corners on this, but the devils always in the details, he told Defense News. We want to make sure that what comes out in text is what we agreed to in concept.

Were knocking out the text as we speak, so everyone can see it today or tomorrow, Luetkemeyer added. Hopefully next week we can our side of the bill firmed it up and get it through.

Both Rep. Nydia Velazquez, D-N.Y., and Sen. Ben Cardin, D-Md., who chair the Small Business Committee in their respective chambers, noted that negotiators have made a lot of progress on the compromise reauthorization.

Velazquez told Defense News that she feels optimistic and that she expects final legislation soon.

Sen. Rand Paul, R-Ky., the ranking member on the Senate Small Business Committee, downplayed the negotiations on Wednesday and told Defense News that they have not assuaged his concerns.

Paul has argued that the program lacks protections against ties between program awardees and China, and that some companies rely entirely on SBIR grants to sustain themselves without spinning off new businesses or products.

Dr. Paul will not reauthorize this program without reforms to strengthen research security and stop abusive behavior by bad actors lining their pockets with taxpayer dollars at the expense of new small businesses with emerging technologies being able to access SBIR awards, a spokesperson for the senator told Defense News in June.

Reauthorization of the program was originally included in an earlier version of the CHIPS and Science bill, but the provision was not included in the final version of the legislation that passed in July.

The total budget for the 40-year-old program ballooned to nearly $3.3 billion in 2019, with the Department of Defense accounting for the majority of the awards. Individual grants range from tens of thousands of dollars to more than a million for a two-year grant.

SBIR provides funding in three phases, with grant amounts typically increasing throughout each stage. For defense SBIR awards, companies are eligible to submit multiple project ideas, which some say leads to companies applying for multiple Phase I awards without ever maturing the proposed technology.

Were trying to find ways to incentivize and do the work yet provide the oversight to continue to do the work not just ripping off the program to continue to get these grants and at the end of the day theyre just making money, but theyre not actually producing products, said Luetkemeyer.

For some entities, for some different departments, there arent that many alternatives to go toto be able to produce or develop a particular product or service for the Defense Department he added. Weve got to be very careful that we dont preclude the ability of companies to be able to meet our defense needs by hamstringing this bill.

Kea Matory, director of legislative policy at the National Defense Industrial Association trade group, said in an interview that criticisms of awarding companies too many Phase I grants signal contrasting standards for small and large companies.

Lots of our bigs get multiple awards, she said. We would never tell one of our large primes oh, youve had too many, you need to sit down.

Matory added that delays in reauthorizing the program are already impacting small businesses.

A lot of them are already hearing that SBIR could go away, she said. Its like a game of telephone as it gets passed along to each person; it sounds more doomsday.

When it comes to innovation, small businesses frequently bring new ideas to the table that could help the Pentagon with its modernization goals, she said. Without SBIR, many of those companies would be disincentivized to want to do business in the government and defense sectors.

The Pentagon will not award new SBIR grants starting Oct. 1 if the legislators fail to reauthorize the program. Ongoing contracts may continue but will not receive further SBIR/STTR funding.

If the draft legislation wins over Paul, the House and Senate could reauthorize SBIR as stand-alone legislation by the end of the month.

And if that doesnt work, Senate Armed Services Committee Chairman Jack Reed, D-R.I., told the Defense News conference that negotiations are also underway to include SBIR reauthorization in the continuing resolution that Congress needs to pass by the end of the month in order to fund the government and avoid a shutdown.

I would prefer that we get reauthorization as a stand-alone bill versus just a straight reauthorization where we stick it into a [continuing resolution], said Luetkemeyer. That really doesnt solve problems. It extends the same problems that we have now.

As a last resort, Congress could reauthorize the program in the Fiscal 2023 National Defense Authorization Act although Congress is unlikely to finalize that legislation until after the SBIR/STTR grants expire.

The House NDAA, which passed 329-101 in July, has a provision that reauthorizes the program without any changes. The Senate must still pass its version of the bill before both chambers agree on final legislation a process that usually takes several weeks.

Bryant Harris is the Congress reporter for Defense News. He has covered U.S. foreign policy, national security, international affairs and politics in Washington since 2014. He has also written for Foreign Policy, Al-Monitor, Al Jazeera English and IPS News.

Catherine Buchaniec is a reporter at C4ISRNET, where she covers artificial intelligence, cyber warfare and uncrewed technologies.

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Congress races to reauthorize innovation grants favored by Pentagon - DefenseNews.com

Commentary

Lets imagine that one day, liberty, prosperity, security, and rationality were all shredded. Most of the country could not go to church, send their kids to school, get a drink at a bar, go to the gym, or even hold a dinner party. Hospitals intubated patients and 88 percent died. This persisted for months, even a year in some places, after which the government came along with a shot many were forced to get else lose a job, and this shot was not needed by most and had sketchy efficacy and safety data.

One might suppose that if such a thing should happen, the perpetrators of such an outrage would be found and justice would be meted out.

Of course all the above did in fact happen in this land of the free. But here is where it gets strange: no one seems responsible for it all. Another way to say this: no one is willing to take responsibility for what happened.

Anthony Fauci, more than anyone else, appears to be the main architect of American lockdowns and vaccine mandates. He was doing several media appearances a day for the better part of two years, adored by the media and parading around like a master of the universe. He claimed that attacks on him were nothing but attacks on science.

One might suppose that he, more than anyone, would bear responsibility for failure. According to him, the opposite is true. He never gave any orders to anyone, he says. Clearly, he has been planning his escape for years.

Once his emails started coming out thanks to FOIA requests, I noticed that he had a special talent for avoiding responsibility. He is a master bureaucrat. Even though he was running everything, he was always careful never to give direct orders in email or make strong judgements. His emails were carefully worded to avoid that. He would always answer in vague terms, never decisively and never with revealing text.

Even when he and his cohorts ordered a direct hit on the Great Barrington Declaration, he tried to keep his fingerprints off of it. It was Francis Collins of the NIH who called for a quick and devastating takedown of the document, whereas Fauci merely sent back links. He did not add any strong words of encouragement. And when confronted about this by Rand Paul, he pointed that out.

This is how a master bureaucrat works. They gain ever more power but they also get ever better at not leaving a paper trail, always setting others up for failure while the master bureaucrat himself avoids having the blame for failure pinned on him.

Such people are everywhere in the workforce, not just the government. You have probably experienced them before in your workplace. They are unusually maddening figures, typically lacking in much skill at all besides the skill of surviving and thriving in a bureaucratic thicket of their own making. Lacking actual skill, they surround themselves with people who can do their work, leaving them all the time in the world for plotting, scheming, and taking credit for all successes. They are equally flattered by everyone around them and secretly despised by these same people.

They have no loyalty to others but demand 100 percent loyalty to themselves. They are always ready to conspire against colleagues and hurl them out if there is a perception of any threat to themselves. They are constantly creating alibis to mask their own incompetence. People fear them so much that they can get away with this caper for years. Eventually of course such people wreck whole institutions.

Senator Rand Paul knows exactly what is going on with Fauci and works to expose him in whatever way he can, given the very limited time he has when Fauci testifies before the Senate. Yesterday, the subject concerned Faucis very obvious and completely untenable neglect of natural immunity in the case of COVID.

Rands point is very obviously beyond dispute. Its one of the biggest scandals of the whole pandemic era. NIH and the CDC in their studies and guidelines buried this point of science as deeply as possible. Why? Because doing so helped whip up disease panic, underscore the thinking behind masks and force human separation, and prepared the way for vaccine mandates. It got so bad that even the World Health Organization removed natural immunity from its website.

In the end, of course, it was natural immunityexposure then recoverythat got us out of the pandemic. No one really disputes that, especially given that the vaccine predictably protects against neither infection nor transmission. Even when Fauci was asked point blank about the subject during the pandemic, he would quickly demur and say that they are studying the problem.

That Fauci buried this known point of science is truly beyond dispute. Of course with Fauci, ever clever, he cannot be trapped. Rand began his brief interrogation by showing a video of Fauci from 2004 in which Fauci says that the best vaccine is infection and recovery. Fauci immediately picks up a sheet of paper from Reuters claiming that the video is taken out of context.

Then Rand moved on to discuss vaccine trials, guidelines, and mandates and how they too completely neglected natural immunity. Almost none of your studies, from the CDC or from the government, said Rand, include the variable of whether or not you have been previously infected. He demanded to know why Fauci has so completely neglected the topic.

Fauci says in response. You keep saying you approve, you do this, you do that. The committees that give approval are FDA, through their advisory committee. The committees that recommend are CDC through their advisory committee . They are not my committees . I dont have any idea what goes on.

Here is the full exchange.

Wow. Listening to Fauci on this occasion, you would think he bears no more responsibility for the pandemic response or bad vaccine science than the server who brought my veal parmesan to the table last night. He is completely innocent of all things! He even posed as a victim here, shoving all responsibility for everything to some vague committees.

This is another master bureaucrat trick: surround yourself with committees that you can always blame for all failure. An investigator can take the next step and talk to all committee members one by one. In the event of success, every member will be glad to take all credit. In the event of a true failure, every single member will claim to have been skeptical all along but got overruled by other idiots on the committee. This is absolutely inevitable, and precisely why these committees exist in the first place: so that no one in particular is ever made responsible.

This strange pattern not only exists at the federal level. It exists in every state, every county, and every city. For that matter, it exists in every country. There is right now a vast and international scramble to avoid all responsibility. We end up with the spooky reality that the world was utterly wrecked by human hands and yet no one can figure out who or what is at fault. We think we know but pinning the disaster on anyone in power is like nailing jello to the wall.

And the problem is across the board. I touch a nerve by writing on the murderous use of ventilators early in the pandemic. Thousands died unnecessarily. But try to find the responsible party and you come up dry. Readers said that I was unfair to Jared Kushner and that might be correct, since he was just following the prescribed treatment at the time. But who prescribed this ghastly method of addressing a respiratory infection? No one seems to know.

Here is the essence of the problem of systemic human evil through history. We know what happened and we know how horrible it all was. But we are too often at a loss to assign agency in the actions themselves. For the bureaucrat, success means avoiding all responsibility. Anthony Fauci is the paradigmatic case of a person who has mastered the craft. His most perfected science is the science of survival.

Views expressed in this article are the opinions of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Epoch Times.

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Fauci, the Master Bureaucrat, Says Its Not His Fault - The Epoch Times

Sen. Rand Paul, R-Ky., is calling for the repeal of the Espionage Act. Greg Nash/Pool/Getty Images hide caption

Sen. Rand Paul, R-Ky., is calling for the repeal of the Espionage Act.

Sen. Rand Paul, R-Ky., is calling for the Espionage Act to be repealed amid a federal investigation into the possible mishandling of government records and classified documents that were found at former President Donald Trump's Florida home.

"The espionage act was abused from the beginning to jail dissenters of WWI. It is long past time to repeal this egregious affront to the 1st Amendment," Paul wrote.

The statement comes less than a week after the FBI search at Trump's Mar-a-Lago estate in Palm Beach, Fla. Investigators took multiple sets of classified documents from the property. The search warrant lists three laws that appear central to the federal investigation, including one that's part of the Espionage Act. So far, neither Trump nor any of his aides have been charged in the investigation.

This would be the first time in U.S. history that a former president has been known to be investigated under the Espionage Act, but it's not the first time the law has been under scrutiny, experts say. Indeed, though Trump has not been charged with any wrongdoing, holding onto classified documents is against the law.

The Espionage Act was passed in 1917, a few months after the U.S. entered World War I. The original law made it illegal for people to obtain or disclose information relating to national defense that could be used to harm the U.S. or benefit another country.

That description has helped prosecute some spies, but increasingly it has been used to threaten or put to trial those who leak sensitive information, Sam Lebovic, a history professor at George Mason University, told NPR.

During the Obama administration, eight people were charged with leaking national security secrets to the media under the Espionage Act more than all the previous administrations combined. At least six more leakers were charged during the Trump administration, according to Lebovic.

Over the years, press freedom advocates have grown concerned that administrations cherry pick what leaked information is deemed a threat to national security.

"Government officials leak classified information to the press all the time. That's how huge amounts of journalism happen," Lebovic said. "Most of it is let go and allowed to happen. Only the instances that really upset the government in power are the ones that are prosecuted."

Heidi Kitrosser, a law professor at Northwestern University, told NPR the danger with the act is that it's too vague and broad.

The law does not explicitly define what "national defense" is or what information could threaten it, she added. Although the U.S. has since created a classification system, there is still a lot of room for interpretation.

More concerning to Kitrosser, the law does not explicitly care about public interest or whether the leaker in question had good motives. That's why a broad spectrum of people can be under threat.

"If the act had a public interest defense, that would give us some kind of focal point around so that we could draw a distinction between somebody leaking information about abuse of a government program to the American media versus someone storing highly classified secrets in a resort hotel," she said.

Yes but it would be difficult for the law to be applied the same way today, Lebovic said.

The anecdote referred by Paul has to do with an early section of the law that targeted people who spoke out against the war.

Roughly 1,000 people were jailed for criticizing World War I but that effort drew intense criticism, according to Lebovic. In 1920, lawmakers repealed the harshest censorship sections of the law. Over the coming decades, the rise of the First Amendment movement also helped protect dissident speech.

That being said, Lebovic said the Espionage Act still raises some concerns about censorship and dissent.

"There's been a shift in the way censorship works, that the government no longer censors expression or opinion or speech. It now censors information," he said.

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Why Rand Paul wants the Espionage Act to be repealed : NPR

Bruno Cooke January 12, 2022

Photo by Shawn Thew-Pool/Getty Images

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US senator Randal Rand Paul and Dr Anthony Fauci sparred during a senate health hearing yesterday, prompting those who witnessed the debate to think about senator Pauls medical background. What kind of doctor is Rand Paul, and where did he go to medical school?

Dr Rand Pauls medical history is in ophthalmology, a branch of medicine and surgery that deals with the diagnosis and treatment of disorders of the eye.Rand Paul received his state-issued medical licence in 1993. As of 2015, his certification, per The Week, comes from a board he incorporated and heads.

Ophthalmology covers vision services (as in glasses and contact lenses) as well as treatment and prevention of medical disorders of the eye including surgery.

In the US, ophthalmologists must complete four years of college, four years of medical school, and four to five years of additional specialised training.

Rand Paul started practising as an ophthalmologist in 1993 in Bowling Green, Kentucky. He turned 30 in the same year.

He set up the Southern Kentucky Lions Eye Clinic two years later and told the National Review in 2013 he has performed more than 100 pro bono surgeries.

Born Randal Howard Paul on 7 January 1963 in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, Rand Paul is the middle child of five.

He grew up in Lake Jackson, Texas, and went to Brazoswood High School, where he was on the swimming team and played defensive back on the football team.

Rand Paul attended Baylor University from 1981 to 1984, during which time he completed his pre-med requirements. However, he left Baylor without completing his Bachelors degree.

Instead, he transferred to his fathers alma mater, the Duke University School of Medicine. At the time, Duke Universitys graduate school didnt require an undergraduate degree for entry.

Paul earned his Doctor of Medicine degree in 1988 and completed his residency five years later.

Paul announced on 22 March 2020 that he had tested positive for covid-19. He was the first member of the US senate to test positive.

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He announced his recovery two weeks later, on 7 April. Shortly afterwards, he started volunteering at a hospital in Bowling Green, Kentucky, where hed received his first job as a practising ophthalmologist.

Rand Pauls medical speciality is cataract and glaucoma surgeries, laser eye surgery, and corneal transplants.

He co-founded the Southern Kentucky Lions Eye Clinic in 1995. The clinic helps provide eye surgery and exams for those who cant afford to pay for them.

For more on what Dr Fauci and senator Paul had to say to each other during yesterdays hearing, read CBS News write-up of the debate.

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Bruno is a novelist, amateur screenwriter and journalist with interests in digital media, storytelling, film and politics. Hes lived in France, China, Sri Lanka and the Philippines, but returned to the UK for a degree (and because of the pandemic) in 2020. His articles have appeared in Groundviews, Forge Press and The Friday Poem, and most are readable on Medium or onurbicycle.com.

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What kind of Dr is Rand Paul, and where did he go to medical school?

U. S. Senator Rand Paul honored P31 with the Senate Small Business of the Week Award. In addition, he came to Morgantown to present a copy of the Congressional Record to Tabby Daugherty in person.

A large crowd of supporters packed into P31 on South Tyler Street Tuesday morning to show their love for local businesswoman Tabby Daugherty and her family.

Sen. Paul, a ranking member of the U.S. Senate Committee on Small Business and Entrepreneurship, noted that the awards started about a year ago to highlight success stories in an environment when about half of new ventures fail.

Not wavering from her beliefs, Ms. Daugherty requested that her pastor Brother TJ Howard lead prayer before Senator Paul presented her with the Congressional Record. Ms. Daugherty thanked her family, friends, and customers for supporting her. She recalled how her business started from modest means of making laundry detergent as a side gig until demand for it exploded.

When it became hard for her to keep up, she quit her job of fourteen years at Life Skills to focus on building her business into a full-time career. That leap of faith has benefited her greatly. Four years later, she has a storefront on South Tyler Street, her product stocked in other local stores, and an online business.

While visiting with Senator Rand Paul, supporters spoke about Tabby's entrepreneurial spirit and her giving heart.

"Tabby ( of P31 Therapeutic Grade Essential Oils and Homemade Products) keeps the essence of her favorite Proverb at the core of her life and shop, evident for all to see," said Paul.

One woman told of how the storefront is not just a shop; it is a place of refuge for those who need someone to talk to; where Tabby holds a weekly class for young women, and several come to visit because they enjoy being with her genuine heart.

P31 carries an array of natural products that are safe and effective for your family. For example, Young Living & Doterra essential oils are sold individually and in mixes and salves. The shop also carries a selection of diffusers and a variety of jewelry. Not only does Ms. Daugherty have her products, but she also encourages other entrepreneurs to showcase their handmade items, such as jewelry and honey, in her shop.

It can be challenging for locally owned businesses to thrive, so amazingly, P31 has succeeded and continued to grow and create a unique connection within the community. So, if you see Tabby Daugherty out and about in town, congratulate her on this fantastic honor!

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Senator Rand Paul honors P31 as Senate Small Business of the Week - Beech Tree News