Given the difficult budget environment and ongoing pressures to cut government spending, the NVCA and TechNet did not want Congressional Appropriators to assume that last year's ARPA-E funding was sufficient and that the program did not need additional funding this year. We were concerned that as a new program, ARPA-E could be vulnerable to funding cuts or worse, elimination. It was important to assert to lawmakers that ARPA-E is precisely the kind of program that government should continue to support in order to reap significant benefits in the future. While ARPA-E has many bi-partisan supporters on Capitol Hill, we felt it was important for Congress to hear from both large corporations and emerging growth start-ups, as well as the venture investment community to drive that message home. Today we delivered a letter in support of ARPA-E funding with more than 120 signatures including many prominent venture capitalists and CEOs. You can read more about the letter and effort in the press release issues by NVCA and TechNet.

NVCA has long supported the creation of ARPA-E and we were pleased when Congress included it as part of the America COMPETES Act and funded it in 2009. ARPA-E is an integral part of the life cycle of clean technology innovation. Director Arun Majumdar has done a commendable job building the team at ARPA-E and, in the past year, that team has established the foundation for a very successful program. NVCA was honored to be asked to be a supporting organization of the first-ever DOE ARPA-E Energy Innovation Summit in March 2010. The event was a significant success and brought together many investors and the companies that applied for funding through the ARPA-E program. Today's letter further evidences our commitment to this program and to early stage funding of clean technologies.