Washington

The Clinton administration is planning extensive reforms to its controversial Advanced Technology Program (ATP). These are planned to end years of partisan battles over the programme which provides federal support for civilian technology developments.

William Daley, the Secretary of Commerce, announced last week that ATP would be remodelled to support joint research projects involving two or more companies. It will provide more support for small companies and less for large ones, and will create new links between its projects and the state governments in the regions where they take place.

The wide-ranging reforms are designed to meet criticisms of the programme made by Republicans in the Congress. Since the Republicans won control of the Congress in 1995, ATP has been the main point of disagreement about science and technology policy between the Congress and the Clinton White House.

Many observers believe that ATP would be more palatable to Republicans if it were to concentrate on small companies and integrate itself with local industrial interests, so that projects would, for example, clearly help batches of auto-component makers in Michigan, or clusters of biotechnology companies in Houston, Texas.

Earlier this year, Lewis Branscomb — a former IBM executive and director of the then National Bureau of Standards, who now heads a Science, Technology and Public Policy programme at Harvard University — produced a report recommending many of the changes now being proposed by Daley.

When President Bill Clinton was first elected in 1992, he pledged to build ATP into a billion-dollar-a-year programme. But Republicans branded it an inappropriate involvement by the government in private-sector activities and sought to eliminate it. As a result the programme has survived on funding of around $250 million a year, with fierce clashes each year on its funding level.