Offshore Sandbagging

The Bush administration is refusing to release a report about the impact of outsourcing and offshoring on the U.S. IT and semiconductor industries.

Instead, the Commerce Department is releasing a 12-page synopsis of the report mandated by Congress in the Consolidated Appropriations Act of 2004 as a sop to the weak-kneed on free trade.

The Democrats want the full report, hinting the administration is hiding something and all is not as cheery as the synopsis implies. The Republicans, for reasons that will become readily apparent, say it wouldn’t be worth the effort to fight the administration.

“It is difficult for me to understand how this committee can seriously talk about bolstering America’s global competitive position if, in the next breath, we claim not to want the most sophisticated analysis done by the federal government on what is happening with American jobs in high-tech fields,” Rep. Bart Gordon (D-Tenn.) said last week.

Gordon and his fellow Democrats then introduced a resolution to the House Science Committee to require Commerce to turn over the report. It was defeated.

“The release of this report not only wouldn’t help us take action on outsouring, it wouldn’t even help us learn more about outsourcing,” House Science Committee Chairman Sherwood Boehlert (R-N.Y.) said.

“Everyone involved in preparing the report agrees that data on outsourcing was hard to come by, given the resources and time that were available to prepare the report.”

Boehlert has it right. After two years and, reportedly, $330,000 later, Commerce doesn’t have a clue about either outsourcing or offshoring.

In effect, the report is worthless, yet another fine example of your taxpayer dollars at work.

This article was first published on InternetNews.com. To read the full article, click here.

RELATED NEWS AND ANALYSIS

• Huawei’s AI Update: Things Are Moving Faster Than We Think

  FEATURE |  By Rob Enderle,
  December 04, 2020

• Keeping Machine Learning Algorithms Honest in the ‘Ethics-First’ Era

  ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE |  By Guest Author,
  November 18, 2020

• Key Trends in Chatbots and RPA

  FEATURE |  By Guest Author,
  November 10, 2020

• Top 10 AIOps Companies

  FEATURE |  By Samuel Greengard,
  November 05, 2020

• What is Text Analysis?

  ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE |  By Guest Author,
  November 02, 2020

• How Intel’s Work With Autonomous Cars Could Redefine General Purpose AI

  ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE |  By Rob Enderle,
  October 29, 2020

• Dell Technologies World: Weaving Together Human And Machine Interaction For AI And Robotics

  ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE |  By Rob Enderle,
  October 23, 2020

• The Super Moderator, or How IBM Project Debater Could Save Social Media

  FEATURE |  By Rob Enderle,
  October 16, 2020

• Top 10 Chatbot Platforms

  FEATURE |  By Cynthia Harvey,
  October 07, 2020

• Finding a Career Path in AI

  ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE |  By Guest Author,
  October 05, 2020

• CIOs Discuss the Promise of AI and Data Science

  FEATURE |  By Guest Author,
  September 25, 2020

• Microsoft Is Building An AI Product That Could Predict The Future

  FEATURE |  By Rob Enderle,
  September 25, 2020

• Top 10 Machine Learning Companies 2020

  FEATURE |  By Cynthia Harvey,
  September 22, 2020

• NVIDIA and ARM: Massively Changing The AI Landscape

  ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE |  By Rob Enderle,
  September 18, 2020

• Continuous Intelligence: Expert Discussion [Video and Podcast]

  ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE |  By James Maguire,
  September 14, 2020

• Artificial Intelligence: Governance and Ethics [Video]

  ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE |  By James Maguire,
  September 13, 2020

• IBM Watson At The US Open: Showcasing The Power Of A Mature Enterprise-Class AI

  FEATURE |  By Rob Enderle,
  September 11, 2020

• Artificial Intelligence: Perception vs. Reality

  FEATURE |  By James Maguire,
  September 09, 2020

• Anticipating The Coming Wave Of AI Enhanced PCs

  FEATURE |  By Rob Enderle,
  September 05, 2020

• The Critical Nature Of IBM’s NLP (Natural Language Processing) Effort

  ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE |  By Rob Enderle,
  August 14, 2020