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Environment

Security, Defense Gain in 2006 Budget

President's pledge to cut domestic spending trims most R&D funding

by LOIS R. EMBER, DAVID J. HANSON, BETTE HILEMAN, CHERYL HOGUE, JEFF JOHNSON, AND SUSAN R. MORRISSEY, C&EN WASHINGTON
February 21, 2005 | A version of this story appeared in Volume 83, Issue 8

In a repeat of last year, president George W. Bush has proposed a research and development budget for fiscal 2006 that awards increases to homeland security and national defense, while slightly cutting the rest of the federal science and technology portfolio.

Bush has proposed spending $132 billion for R&D next year, a rise of $733 million, or 1% above last year's total. The bulk of this total, $71 billion, is for defense, and all but $5.5 billion of that is for weapon system testing and evaluation.

The National Institutes of Health, still trying to recover from a 2% increase for fiscal 2005, is slated for a less-than-1% increase next year to $28.7 billion. The National Science Foundation, which suffered its first budget decrease in many years in 2005, would barely recover that loss with a 2% rise in 2006 to $5.6 billion.

Many other research agencies would get substantial cuts. The Department of Agriculture's research programs would be cut 13% to $2.4 billion, and at the Department of Commerce, R&D is slated to fall 11% to $1.0 billion. Smaller R&D reductions are proposed for the Energy Department and the Environmental Protection Agency.

The Administration is trying to keep these numbers in perspective by saying that domestic discretionary spending has been cut across the budget in order to reduce the record federal deficit. John H. Marburger III, science adviser to the President and director of the White House Office of Science & Technology Policy, says, "In my opinion, this year's R&D budget proposal maintains levels of funding that allow Americans to maintain their leadership in science and move ahead in selective priority areas."

This year's budget faces a complicated time in Congress. Republican leaders in the House have proposed a reorganization of the Appropriations Committee that would reduce the number of subcommittees from 13 to 10. The Senate rejected that plan for its subcommittees, setting up serious conflicts between House and Senate spending bills.

The following review of R&D agencies comes with some caveats. The numbers given are mostly budget obligations--that is, the money that agencies can contract to spend during the fiscal year. This may be more or less than the agencies actually spend, or outlay, during the year. Also, the federal budget is a complicated document with various ways of adding up programs and reaching totals. As a result, sometimes agency or department figures and totals from the White House Office of Management & Budget (OMB) are not the same and can be published in different places as different amounts. These variations are usually small and reflect alternative methods of dividing up funds.

NSF. For the second year in a row, the President's request for NSF is far below the amount needed to put the agency on pace to double its budget over a five-year period, as approved in the 2002 NSF Authorization Act. The 2006 request sets the agency's budget at $5.6 billion, up just 2.4% over 2005.

NSF Director Arden L. Bement Jr. admitted at the agency's budget briefing that doubling NSF's budget isn't going to happen, at least in the near future. "I think [our budget] is going to get more and more behind before it gets back on track" for doubling, he said.

But Bement was optimistic that, even with the modest increase of only $132 million, NSF would be able to take on some new responsibilities, meet ongoing commitments, and employ more staff. The increase, however, does not allow much room for growth in education and research programs, he acknowledged.

Adding to the budget challenge is the growing number of proposals the agency receives. The increase in research grant proposals has resulted in a dramatic drop in the proposals that are successful from 30% in the late 1990s to an expected 20% this year. The low funding rate means that only about 6,300 research grants can be supported in 2006 at an average size of $137,000.

"As the number of ideas--and their complexity--grows, our ability to keep pace is challenged," Bement said. "In the coming year, our goal is to maintain the recent gains that we have made in increasing award size and duration, while halting the erosion in the funding rate," he noted.

To help broaden participation in the science and engineering workforce, NSF will sharpen its focus on several programs with proven records. These include the Louis Stokes Alliances for Minority Participation, the Alliances for Graduate Education & the Professoriate, and the Centers of Research Excellence in Science & Technology.

NSF will also continue to focus funding on four priority areas: biocomplexity in the environment, nanoscale science and engineering, mathematical sciences, and human and social dynamics. Funding for these areas and related core activities will remain comparable with last year's levels, according to the agency.

Ongoing projects funded under the agency's Major Research Equipment & Facilities Construction will remain on track, as the account is slated to receive a 44% increase to $250 million.

NSF is adding polar icebreakers to its research infrastructure. The 2006 budget transfers $48 million from the Coast Guard to NSF to operate and maintain a three-ship icebreaker fleet. Without this transfer, polar research programs--which will oversee the icebreakers--would see a decrease in funding, and the increase in research and related activities at NSF would drop from 2.7% to 1.5%.

At the NSF Mathematical & Physical Sciences Directorate (MPS), a 1.5% increase to $1.1 billion is proposed. Within MPS, chemistry is budgeted to grow by 1% to $181 million. Aside from the mathematical sciences division, which is being held steady, chemistry would receive the smallest percentage increase in funding as compared with MPS's other divisions--astronomy, physics, and materials research. Chemistry also trails the other four divisions in the overall funding.

MPS Assistant Director Michael S. Turner noted at the budget briefing that the level of funding for chemistry is the biggest disappointment within the directorate's budget. It's not because of lack of great opportunities in the area, he said, but rather that projects in other areas are seen as more compelling.

NIH. The President's request puts the NIH 2006 budget at $28.7 billion, up just 0.5% from last year. This small increase comes three years after the agency completed doubling its budget.

A similarly small gain of 0.6% is requested across all of NIH's 27 institutes and centers. This funding continues the agency's support of research related to specific diseases such as cancer, HIV/AIDS, and diabetes. NIH will also support research priorities that include biodefense, an intra-agency plan to accelerate neuroscience research known as the NIH Neuroscience Blueprint, and an initiative to develop chemical threat countermeasures.

Another priority area is the NIH Roadmap for Biomedical Research, the transagency initiative targeting major opportunities and gaps in biomedical research. Road map funding would increase by $98 million to $333 million next year, with $83 million coming from the NIH director's discretionary fund. The institutes and centers would contribute 0.9% of their individual budgets to supply the remaining $250 million in proposed road map funding.

The 2006 budget for the road map's 28 research initiatives would be split among three themes: $169 million for new pathways to discovery, $44 million for multidisciplinary research teams of the future, and $120 million for reengineering the clinical research enterprise.

Funding for research project grants (RPGs) would increase 0.4% to $15.5 billion under the proposed budget and would be used to fund approximately 38,746 grants--402 fewer than in 2005. Of these grants, the number of competing RPGs will increase by about 247 to 9,463, with the average size of a competing RPG being $347,000, about the same as last year.

NIH will increase its support of young scientists by raising postdoctoral stipends for individuals with one to two years' experience by 4.0%. The lower end of the range of stipend for fellows will increase from $35,568 to $36,996, while the maximum will remain set at $51,036. In addition, the budget provides $500 more in institutional allowances for individual postdoctoral trainees to cover rising health benefit costs.

DEFENSE. The Administration has proposed the largest dollar increase in R&D funds for fiscal 2006 for the Department of Defense. Totaling nearly $71 billion, the department's research, development, testing, and evaluation (RDT&E) programs would receive 54% of all federal R&D support. The proposed rise would be $417 million above fiscal 2005, a 1% increase.

The increase, however, masks cuts to the traditional research and development activities at DOD. Basic research would be down $122 million to $1.4 billion, and applied research drops by $711 million to $4.1 billion. The Administration rationalizes these decreases by noting that Congress added $900 million in earmarks to the RDT&E budget from 2005, and that these have been removed from the 2006 budget. Taking this into account, the basic and applied research accounts are slightly higher than proposed last year. However, large-weapon-system development budgets would rise by $3.2 billion to $41.5 billion next year.

Research priorities for DOD next year include work on remote sensors and high-performance computing, the Administration states. This includes funding advanced technology work on imaging, information processing, and detection of explosives and chemical and biological agents. Also, the budget funds research on new materials for troop clothing to provide more comfort and improved camouflage.

Funding for some well-known defense-wide programs is also slated to rise next year. The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, better known as DARPA, is proposed to get a 4% increase to $3.1 billion, and the Chemical & Biological Defense Program is slated to rise 25% to $898 million.

ENERGY. A "difficult budget" was how top Administration officials and DOE documents describe the 2006 proposal for the department.

The budget plan came out as new Energy Secretary Samuel W. Bodman had been on the job just six days. It offered little cheer for department researchers in this time of deficit spending and diminished expectations.

Overall, the Bush Administration is requesting $23.4 billion, which is some $500 million, or 2%, less than what Congress appropriated to DOE last year. The proposed level is about $1 billion less than the Administration sought for the department a year ago.

Almost half the department's research budget is directed to the Office of Science, which would receive $3.5 billion, 3.8% less than its 2005 appropriation. However, one bright spot for chemists is a proposed 3.7% increase for the Office of Science's Basic Energy Sciences (BES) programs.

At BES, the Administration is seeking nearly $1.15 billion and includes $40 million more for research operations at DOE's five nanoscience research centers, four of which are to be operating in 2006. The increase is offset by a similarly sized cut in construction expenditures at the facilities.

Also, BES plans to increase research spending for the Spallation Neutron Source at Oak Ridge National Laboratory by $70 million, half of which will be offset by construction cost reductions as the system begins operation this year, DOE says.

At another BES construction site, the Linac Coherent Light Source at Stanford University, work is stepping up, and the budget proposes a $50 million increase to $83 million for the $400 million upgrade.

Another Science Office area heavily staffed by chemists, the Biological & Environmental Research program, would not fare so well under the Administration's proposal, however. The core program, after removing congressional earmarks, would receive a 21.7% reduction to $456 million under the request. Funds for research on the human genome ($150 million) and climate change ($143 million) remain the largest of the research areas, and funds for research in structural biology, environmental remediation, and medical applications would be reduced.

Looking at other R&D spending, nuclear energy research would receive $191 million, a 12% million increase. Most of the funds will be used to study nuclear energy's potential to produce hydrogen and would be coupled with other DOE initiatives to support the President's hydrogen initiative.

Fossil energy R&D would be reduced, and cuts would come from large reductions in oil and natural gas research. Remaining would mostly be coal-related R&D programs, which would make up more than $350 million of the Office of Fossil Energy's $491 million budget.

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Within the coal R&D program, development of integrated gasification combined-cycle technologies would receive $165 million and carbon sequestration technology development would get a $21 million boost to $67 million.

Also within fossil fuel R&D, fuel-cell research would receive a cut of $12 million, taking it to $65 million in 2006.

For energy conservation areas, most research funding ($250 million) supports the President's fuel-cell and hydrogen-fuel-vehicle research program, which would receive an increase of $9 million.

For renewable energy R&D, three areas--hydrogen fuel, solar, and biomass--make up the lion's share of the $300 million research program, together with some $40 million for wind and $23 million for geothermal research. The proposed spending for these areas comes close to matching amounts appropriated last year, with the exception of biomass R&D, which would be cut by $30 million, to $50 million.

The Administration also seeks to reduce environmental cleanup research. The proposed budget shows a $39 million (64%) reduction in cleanup R&D. DOE says the eliminated funding supports congressionally directed earmarks, which are opposed by the Administration.

The research area receiving the largest percentage increase is nuclear nonproliferation work funded through the National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA), a part of DOE that oversees the U.S.'s nuclear weapons activities.

Overall, NNSA would receive the biggest boost in the DOE budget, a proposed $233 million jump to $9.4 billion. Most of the proposed increase is directed to nuclear weapons nonproliferation work, a $215 million increase, bringing it to $1.6 billion, or 17% of U.S. nuclear weapons spending.

Within nonproliferation efforts rests $272 million in R&D spending, aimed to develop technologies to detect and monitor nuclear weapon production and testing worldwide, DOE says. Also proposed for large increases would be spending to secure nuclear weapon material around the world, to shut down plutonium production plants in Russia, and to dispose of surplus U.S. and Russian weapons-grade material.

Another Administration R&D budget priority that has garnered much attention is its quest to study a new generation of so-called bunker-buster nuclear weapons. Last year, Congress blocked the program, but the Administration plans to try again at a reduced level. This year, NNSA wants $4 million to research the "robust nuclear earth penetrator" weapon, and DOD is seeking $4.5 million in support.

HOMELAND SECURITY. Spending for non-defense-related homeland security across the federal government would increase 8% to $50 billion over fiscal 2005. Included in this increase is $596 million to USDA, the Department of Health & Human Services, and the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) to protect U.S. agriculture and food supply.

EPA would receive a total of $185 million for homeland security activities, including $19 million in new funding to develop capabilities to detect and decontaminate threat agents. Another $94 million would fund ongoing and new research related to water security and postincident decontamination.

NIH would get $1.8 billion--an increase of $56 million or 3% over fiscal 2005--to fund biodefense R&D activities, including $50 million to develop countermeasures to chemical threats and $47 million to develop radiological and nuclear threat countermeasures. The products from these R&D activities may then be acquired under Project Bioshield, a 10-year program to stockpile vaccines and drugs to combat terrorism. In the 2004 DHS appropriations, $5.6 billion was made available to fund Project Bioshield through fiscal 2013.

The Pentagon would receive a total of $1.2 billion from 2006 to 2011--$147 million in 2006--to upgrade facilities crucial for R&D on medical countermeasures to chemical, biological, and nuclear threats.

At DHS itself, the department's proposed 2006 budget of $41 billion--up 7% over 2005--includes $1.47 billion for R&D, a 24% increase over 2005. Basic research spending would be pegged at $112 million, a 32% increase over 2005, and applied research would be $399 million, a 15% increase. Proposed spending for development is $746 million, a 25% increase.

A major new thrust for DHS is $227 million proposed to fund the creation of the Domestic Nuclear Defense Office. DNDO is charged with developing a comprehensive system to detect, deter, and report attempts to import or transport a nuclear explosive device, or fissile or radiological material within the U.S. Overall, DHS plans to spend $262 million for R&D on advanced detection devices to reduce the chances of a radiological or nuclear device entering the country.

In fiscal 2006, DHS will begin to consolidate some of the overlapping functions that the amalgam of 22 agencies produced. First to be combined are the research, development, test, and evaluation activities within its Science & Technology Directorate. The department plans to spend a bit over $127 million to bring scientists and engineers from the Transportation Safety Administration, the U.S. Coast Guard, Customs & Border Protection, and Information Analysis & Infrastructure Protection into the directorate.

The Science & Technology Directorate would spend $107 million, twice the 2005 funding level, for R&D of chemical agent countermeasures. A new, $20 million initiative for next year is the development of a warning and identification system for chemical agents whose vapor pressures are too low to be detected by available, conventional means.

NASA. The President has requested $16.5 billion in funding for the National Aeronautics & Space Administration in 2006--a 2.4% increase from 2005. The focus of the proposed funding increase continues the Administration's commitment to its space exploration plan announced last January.

As part of this plan to return humans to the moon and, eventually, to take humans to Mars and beyond, NASA has spent the past 12 months reorganizing itself and reprioritizing its programs. As a result, the agency has canceled and delayed several programs to make room for those more directly related to space exploration.

Perhaps the most notable casualty is the Hubble Space Telescope, which needs a servicing mission to extend its scientific life. The 2006 budget provides only $93 million for Hubble, mostly to develop a robotic mission to safely remove the telescope from orbit.

The lack of funding for a Hubble servicing mission has already drawn congressional objections. The House Science Committee held a preemptive hearing on future options for Hubble the week prior to the budget's release to gather information. On the Senate side, Sen. Barbara A. Mikulski (D-Md.) vowed in a statement to fight for servicing mission funds.

As the future for Hubble remains unclear, development and production of its successor, the James Webb Space Telescope, continues. The telescope is set to receive a 19% increase to $372 million in 2006 to keep the project on pace for a 2011 launch.

The 2006 budget calls for an additional $366 million for space shuttle return-to-flight and related activities, bringing the total funding for the space shuttle program to $4.5 billion. The agency reiterated its plan to retire the shuttle fleet in 2010.

NASA is also slated to receive $3.2 billion in 2006 for new spacecraft development and technologies for robotic missions and long-term human missions. Included in this funding is $320 million for Project Prometheus, which involves the development of a nuclear propulsion reactor for use in deep-space probes.

COMMERCE. The 2006 budget request for the Commerce Department's primary science agencies--the National Institute of Standards & Technology and the National Oceanic & Atmospheric Administration--provides increases for R&D research.

For NIST, the President is proposing a 12.6% increase in funding to $420 million for its laboratories and scientific programs. Included are funding increases for three research initiatives: advanced manufacturing, measurements and standards for homeland security, and new measurement horizons for the U.S. economy and science.

All but one of NIST's scientific and technical programs would be given increases under the 2006 budget. The largest gain is the line item for national research facilities, a new category created by a rearrangement of accounts. The 36% gain, to $47.9 million, for these facilities would be spread between the NIST Center for Neutron Research and the National Nanomanufacturing & Nanometrology Facility.

The area of chemical science and technology is also slated for growth, with a 21% increase to $52.4 million. Work planned for 2006 includes developing methods to rapidly measure genetic variation at the DNA level for use on human identity testing and high-throughput drug discovery, as well as continuing with theoretical and experimental studies of molecular electronic devices.

The President's request for NOAA is $3.6 billion, up 6% from 2005. This funding would support increases in the U.S. Commission on Ocean Policy-related activities, the Global Earth Observation programs, climate-change programs, weather and warning forecasts, satellite programs, and ecosystems.

Among the programs highlighted by the agency is the U.S. Tsunami Warning Network, which is slated to receive $9.5 million. NOAA will also apply $3.5 million to continue building and maintaining the Global Observing System and $2.0 million to expand efforts to quantify how aerosols influence climate change.

EPA. President Bush has requested $761 million for science and technology at EPA in fiscal 2006. This represents slightly more than the $750 million Congress appropriated to the agency for science and technology in fiscal 2005 and 10% more than Bush sought for 2005.

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Stephen L. Johnson, acting administrator of EPA, says the fiscal 2006 increase, in addition to a rise in spending on homeland security measures, would boost funding for computational toxicology, which blends mathematical models with data from molecular biology studies about the effects of chemical exposure (C&EN, Oct. 13, 2003, page 50). According to the budget summary, the agency's research program hopes to provide the first computational toxicology methods that can substitute for traditional toxicology tests using laboratory animals. These assays could be used in the agency's program to screen compounds that may disrupt the endocrine system.

EPA's budget request for science and technology includes about $25 million divided among the agency's air, water, and waste regulatory programs so they can contract with the Office of Research & Development (ORD) for scientific studies. This funding would support short-term projects addressing high-priority issues for regulatory programs, Johnson says. This fee-for-service plan is new to the agency and reflects private-sector practice.

The agency's air program plans to spend some of this money for research generating data for regulators to use in establishing "residual risk" standards for individual air pollutants, says Jeffrey Holmstead, EPA assistant administrator for air and radiation. The residual risk effort is focused on hazardous air pollutants governed by regulations specifying the technology required to control emissions. EPA is determining whether people and the environment still face risks from these emissions despite the technology-based standards.

Holmstead says he expects the air program to contract with ORD to provide "acceptable risk" numbers for specific hazardous air pollutants.

Other science and technology priorities for EPA in fiscal 2006 include multidisciplinary research on understanding the risks to people and the environment from mercury, pesticides and toxic substances, endocrine disruptors, and climate change. This includes research on evaluating cost and performance of technology to reduce mercury emissions from coal-fired power plants. Another project is the development of technologies that small drinking-water systems can use to strip arsenic from their water.

A Superfund research effort will be terminated by EPA in fiscal 2006. Hazardous waste site cleanup methods evaluated by the Superfund Innovative Technology Evaluation Program "have become standard tools for remediation" of hazardous waste, EPA says, so they no longer need government support. In contrast to the early days of the Superfund program, companies developing innovative cleanup technologies now have many opportunities to sell their systems and products.

USDA. The department's research budget would plummet 13%, from an estimated $2.8 billion in fiscal 2005 to $2.4 billion proposed for fiscal 2006.

Among USDA's R&D agencies, the budget for the Agricultural Research Service would fall the most, $227 million, or 17%, from an estimated $1.3 billion in 2005 to a proposed $1.1 billion in 2006. ARS is USDA's principal research agency in the area of natural and biological science.

Last year, ARS spent an estimated $175 million on projects earmarked by Congress, but the 2005 budget would eliminate all of them.

Instead, some areas of ARS research would receive increased funding in 2006. For example, the program on bovine spongiform encephalopathy--"mad cow disease"--would receive an increase of $7.5 million. A boost of $7 million would support research to develop more sensitive and rapid on-site diagnostic tests and vaccines for existing and emerging diseases of livestock, such as avian influenza. And an increase of $17.7 million is proposed for research on controlling invasive species and exotic and emerging diseases of crops.

An additional $4.2 million would be allocated to research on disease-resistant varieties of crops and livestock to be made available to producers in the event of a natural or intentional catastrophic disease or pest outbreak. The budget also includes a $15 million increase for studies to defeat bacteria, viruses, and chemicals of food safety concern. It proposes an increase of $6.8 million for nutrition survey research directed toward understanding the factors contributing to rising obesity rates.

An increase of $3.2 million is proposed for the Climate Change Research Initiative. These funds would support interdisciplinary studies of carbon sequestration in agricultural systems, expanding the existing ARS network of sites that measure greenhouse gases.

The budget for the Cooperative State Research Education & Extension Service would decline $143 million, or 12%, from $1.18 billion estimated for 2005 to $1.04 billion. CREES provides funding for projects conducted in partnership with the state agricultural experiment stations, state cooperative extension systems, land-grant universities, colleges, and other research and education institutions. It is responsible for administering USDA's primary competitive research grants program, the National Research Initiative. CREES's budget falls primarily because congressional earmark projects, funded at $181 million in 2005, are eliminated.

Eliminating the earmark projects also allows the National Research Initiative to show an increase of $70 million, to $250 million. This program supports studies in agricultural genomics, nanotechnology, food safety, water quality, and human nutrition and obesity.

Because most of the cuts in USDA's proposed budget, a total of $356 million, come from zeroing out earmarked projects in the 2005 budget, and Congress usually restores most of the earmarked research, the overall R&D budget is likely to fall much less than the requested 13%. Last year, for instance, USDA's proposed research budget declined 3%, but the actual budget rose 8% after Congress rejected many cuts.

THE BUDGET PROCESS. The fiscal 2006 budget now goes to the House and Senate Appropriations Committees. Hearings will be held on each bill by various committees, and legislation will emerge that sets the levels of spending for all federal departments and agencies. The numbers approved by Congress may be different from those proposed by the Administration, but historically, R&D has not been radically changed. The process is supposed to be completed and the bills signed by the President by Sept. 30, the last day of fiscal 2005.

 

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