R&D Funding Tries to Keep Pace

Congress is rapidly nearing completion of the federal budget for fiscal 2006, two months after the year began on Oct. 1. Most of the individual appropriations bills that include major research and development agencies have been passed and either have been signed by President George W. Bush or are expected to be signed soon. The exceptions are the largest R&D appropriations, those for the Department of Defense and the National Institutes of Health. Overall, the support for R&D from Congress for 2006 has been good, but not great.

One sword hanging over all of the budget numbers is Congress' concern about federal spending to cover the enormous costs of responding to Hurricanes Katrina and Rita. To help pay for this huge expense, Congress may impose a 2% across-the-board cut in spending, even on bills that have been signed into law. Such a cut would make most fiscal 2006 R&D funding less than agencies received in 2005.

The Department of Defense appropriations bill remains the most contentious spending bill this year, as Congress is debating issues relating to the war in Iraq. But it looks like DOD research, development, testing, and evaluation (RDT&E) spending will be increased for 2006, even though the President had proposed a small decrease. That increase could be about $1 billion, to a total of $72.4 billion, if the Senate figures prevail; most of the total goes to development and testing of major weapons programs.

DOD basic research funding and applied research, however, are not expected to get a raise. Although the President had sought a 13% decrease for basic research in his proposed budget in February, it looks as if the cuts will be much smaller, in the range of 4 to 5%, to about $1.45 billion. Applied research is not being cut much, remaining about the same as in 2005 at about $4.84 billion.

Funding for the major research agencies within DOD is a mixed bag. The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, which devotes much of its funds to advanced technology research, would receive a budget cut in the Senate but an increase from the House. Fiscal 2005 funding for DARPA was just under $3.0 billion.

On the other hand, the Missile Defense Agency will be cut at least 10%, to $7.9 billion, as its development efforts start to wind down, while the homeland security-related Chemical & Biological Defense Program is slated for a major increase, up to 50%, to $1.1 billion.

The final appropriation for the National Institutes of Health was reported out of the House-Senate conference committee late this month, but was voted down by the House because of a variety of issues. The bill would have provided a small increase for the agency, but not much. NIH likely will receive a $253 million increase over last year, to $29.3 billion. The increase is $111 million more than the House bill had sought, but $908 million less than the Senate had approved. NIH has calculated that it will not be able maintain inflationary adjustments with this small an increase and will probably have to decrease the number of grants it approves.

Both the House and Senate appropriations bills touched on the controversial issue of open access to scientific literature by asking for information on the NIH policy of requesting its researchers to deposit their papers in the freely accessible NIH PubMed Central database within a year of publication. Congress asks that NIH report on the progress of this policy, including estimates of the number of peer-reviewed journal articles in PubMed compared with the total number of published articles from NIH-funded work and on the average delay between journal publication and public access through NIH.

Congress restored some research funding to the Department of Energy, rejecting a 4.5% cut in the DOE Office of Science that was requested by the President. Overall R&D, which includes defense and homeland security spending, will be $8.7 billion, a slight increase from 2005 that mostly goes to defense R&D. DOE Office of Science funding for 2006 will be $3.4 billion, up 0.6% from last year, although the increase is mostly for projects that have been specifically earmarked by Congress.

DOE is the largest single agency supporting R&D in the physical sciences. It funds about 40% of all federal support of physical science, but that support has fallen 20% since 1994 to $2.1 billion in 2004. The 2006 budget continues that decline.

One consequence of this tight funding is a reduction in user times on DOE research instruments at the national laboratories where scientists can arrange to use equipment for their own experiments. The squeeze on operating time is expected to reduce use by up to 60% at some of the labs.

The package of DOE energy research programs appears to get an increase in funding from 2005, up 10.7% to $1.3 billion, but only because a rescission in last year's funds of $160 million reduced the funding base. Without the rescission, energy research funding would be down in 2006.

Congress is cutting back on requests for hydrogen and fuel-cell R&D but is raising funding for coal and nuclear energy. Fuel-cell research, for example, a key part of the Bush Administration push to a hydrogen economy, would be down $11 million to $138 million next year. In addition, funding for energy conservation R&D is down. The biggest increase in coal research is for carbon sequestration R&D. Nuclear R&D would go up 32% to $112 million, supporting efforts to develop new technologies for nuclear power plants.

The story looks a little better at the National Science Foundation for 2006. After cutting its budget in fiscal 2005, Congress has voted NSF a 3% increase for 2006, or $165 million, to $5.6 billion. Funding for research programs is slated for $4.2 billion, an increase of $108 million, which brings the total back to fiscal 2004 levels. Most of the individual directorates will receive increases of 2 to 4%, and the Directorate for Mathematical & Physical Sciences is slated for a 2.5% rise to $1.1 billion.

This small increase is expected to hamper NSF in its competitively awarded grant programs, which will continue to have a success rate of only about 20% in 2006. Congress has also instructed NSF to look into innovation inducement awards that would encourage researchers to participate in contests to solve specific scientific problems.

NSF education programs will be cut again for 2006. The Directorate for Education & Human Resources budget is down $36 million, to $805 million, and the Math & Science Partnership program is funded for only $63 million, down from $139 million in fiscal 2004. The only bright spot is the Experimental Program To Stimulate Competitive Research (EPSCoR), which assists states that have traditionally been underrepresented in federal R&D funding. It will get $100 million, a $6 million increase.

The two research agencies within the Department of Commerce are the National Oceanographic & Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) and the National Institute for Standards & Technology (NIST). Congress has given NOAA a 2.8% increase to $668 million, but much of the $18 million increase is earmarked for research on fisheries and mammals in Alaska.

NIST is slated to be cut, losing $13 million, to just $448 million in 2006. Most of the loss is from the Advanced Technology Program, an industry-based, fund-matching, high-risk research program that the Administration and House have tried to eliminate for several years. Because of Senate support, in 2006, it will receive $80 million, down 42% from last year, and just enough to fund its outstanding grants. NIST basic laboratory programs will receive a 5.4% increase to $334 million.

Much of the R&D spending at the National Aeronautics & Space Administration goes toward development and testing of huge projects. Although NASA's R&D budget will increase 7.3% to $11.5 billion, that increase, and more, will go to development of a new Constellation System Program to replace the aging space shuttles. As a result, many of the agency's biological and physical science programs will see reductions this fiscal year. The Prometheus Nuclear System for developing nuclear propulsion technology will be reduced from $270 million to $126 million, and the Earth-Sun System Program, considered an important component of the interagency Climate Change Science Program, will be cut more than 7% to $2.1 million.

Other major research agencies will receive modest increases in R&D budgets, as well. At the Department of Agriculture, Congress has moved to try to balance R&D funds among the formula funds for land-grant universities, competitive grants, and earmarks. The result is a 0.4% reduction of USDA R&D funds to $2.4 billion. This is in contrast to a 15% cut proposed by the Administration, much of which came from elimination of Congress' earmarks.

The Department of Homeland Security will see a 4.7% increase in R&D funds, to $1.3 billion for 2006. The largest portion of this, $380 million, will go to finding countermeasures to biological attacks; $212 million is designated to handling radiological threats; and $139 million is for R&D on chemical countermeasures. And at the Environmental Protection Agency, R&D spending will also increase slightly, about 1.2% to $579 million. Clean air research will get $106 million, a rise of $4 million, and clean water research will rise $3 million, to $97 million. Environmental research related to human health issues, including computational toxicology, endocrine disruptors, and risk assessment, will gain $9 million, to $244 million.

Late this month, Congress passed a continuing resolution for the budget that will allow federal offices to continue to receive funds even if their individual appropriations bill has not been signed. Congress had hoped to have the entire budget completed by Thanksgiving, but that attainment proved impossible.