Augustine concedes it's "a fair question" whether the concern over China and India is any more legitimate than the worry about Japan was. "But I have to say that times are different today," he explains. China and India have embraced the free market and now "are copying our technological methods." With regard to the resurgence of the U.S. semiconductor industry, he says dryly, "The competitor we were worried about then, Japan, imploded. You can't go through life betting that your competitors will implode."

Retired Merck and Co. Chairman R. Roy Vagelos, who was responsible for making K­12 math and science education the No. 1 priority of the Augustine committee, notes that the United States is producing 70 000 engineers a year, while China is producing 350 000. "It is a matter of overall numbers and quality," he says, explaining that too many K­12 math and science teachers are untrained in their subjects and are failing to excite their students.

All three proposals—Bush's and the two from Congress—would cost a considerable amount at a time when the federal deficit in fiscal 2007 is projected to be $354 billion. Samuel M. Rankin III, director of the American Mathematical Society and chairman of the Coalition for National Science Funding, says the president's proposal to increase the NSF budget by 7.9 percent in 2007 is welcome, given the agency's flat budgets of past years. But the $6 billion level the president proposes for 2007 is well short of the $10 billion level Congress authorized for 2007 four years ago. "We still need to do more," Rankin notes, to get to the intended level.

Moreover, Rankin explains that the House and Senate appropriations committees will be under intense pressure to divert some of the money for the NSF to the National Institutes of Health, in Bethesda, Md., whose budget doubled in a recent five-year period but has since suffered some squeezing. Bush's fiscal 2007 proposal includes a reduction for the National Cancer Institute, for example.

But even if basic science research budgets are doubled in the next five years, Rankin worries about what will happen after that period is over. He says an NIH-like boom-or-bust funding approach plays havoc with academic researchers, who never know when the funding will stop. And when it does, a project often comes crashing to a halt, without yielding the kinds of research gains that require many years of patient, careful research attention.

Deborah L. Wince-Smith is president of the Council on Competitiveness, in Washington, D.C., which former Hewlett-Packard Co. CEO John Young helped create in the 1980s after he wrote the "Here Come the Japanese" report for President Ronald Reagan. Wince-Smith says the United States must accelerate funding in frontier research and make sure that U.S. children have the skills needed for high-wage jobs. But national economic success depends on more than just producing additional, better-educated engineers, she adds. "It is just as important that we ground our kids in art and music," she continues. "The Soviet Union had the most scientists and engineers in the world. But there was no creativity under that system. You need a strong liberal arts education along with math and science, because that pushes how we think, how we look at the world."