Pentagon officials for years have sounded alarms about the dwindling supply of qualified scientists and engineers in the government. But now the tide appears to be turning, said Allan Shaffer, principal deputy director of defense research and engineering. Proof of that is the success of the National Defense Education Program, which pays participants to get undergraduate and graduate degrees if they commit to a payback period to work for a Defense Department laboratory. “I have 134 people in the program right now,” Shaffer said at a congressional hearing. “This year, we had over 1,000 people apply for roughly 100 scholarships. So we’re getting good people to apply.”