Dear Santa (or, the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009)

Dear Santa,

We have been very good. Please send us $825 Billion worth of free stuff.

Sincerely Yours,

Congress


Turn on C-SPAN today and you can see that the above is the level of considered debate and opinion being given to the 625 page American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009.

Still, if we're about to encumber $825 Billion of my children's funds, I thought it would be nice to see what Cyber, CyberCrime, and CyberSecurity Goodies might be waiting under the Christmas Tree.

For starters, we have the "Wireless and Broadband Deployment Grant Programs", established in section 6002 of division B of this Act, which will receive $2,825,000,000, of which $1,000,000,000 shall be for Wireless Deployment Grants and $1,825,000,000 shall be for Broadband Deployment Grants. I'd love to see the project plan and budget spreadsheets that came out to that nice round $1 Billion. (So, how much do we need to provide wireless access for everyone? Hmmm...when we add it all up it comes up to exactly $1 Billion. How convenient!)

Other things under Commerce Justice and Science that touch on technology:

Commerce

$650,000,000 for the Digital-to-Analog Converter Box Program

$100,000,000 for the National Institute of Standards and Technology for Scientific and Technical Research and Services.

$100,000,000 for "Industrial Technology Services", of which $30,000,000 shall be for Hollings Manufacturing Partnership.

$300,000,000 for "Construction of Research Facilities

$400,000,000 for the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration "for habitat restoration and mitigation activities"

$600,000,000 to NOAA for "accelerating satellite development and acquisition, acquiring climate sensors, and climate modeling capacity, and establishing climate data records."

Justice

$3,000,000,000 for the Edward Byrne Memorial Justice Assistance Grant Program.

$1,000,000,000 for Community Oriented Policing Services

State

$98,527,000 shall be available to State under the Comprehensive National Cybersecurity Initiative,

Health

$50,000,000 for "Public Health and Social Service Emergency Fund", to include Pandemic influenza preparedness, biomedical advanced research, Project BioShield, and Cyber Security.

Science

$400,000,000 to NASA, of which $250,000,000 shall be solely for accelerating the development of the tier 1 set of Earth science climate research missions.

$2,500,000,000 to the National Science Foundation for "Research and relate activities", with $200,000,000 earmarked for research facilities modification,

$400,000,000 more to NSF for "Major Research Equipment and Facilities Construction".

Energy

$18,500,000,000 for "Energy Efficiency and Renewable Energy" programs.

Social Security Administration

$400,000,000 for the contruction of a new National Computer Center

Testing of Health Information Technology

Section 4201. NIST - several new programs to develop more advanced health care technology.

Not much analysis here today, just thought these were some aspects of the Stimulus package that might be of interest to the readers here.

Oh - One other Cyber thing - throughout the bill, there is a requirement to document how funds are used by giving updates to the Internet website, "recovery.gov". I have to say that's a nice touch in the first legislation of the year -- here is the website where you MUST INFORM THE AMERICAN PEOPLE.