Science and Technology in Congress May 2013 Articles Sequester in Review President Releases Budget Budget Proposal Consolidates Education Programs Regular Features Congress In Brief Agency Updates Reports and Publications AAAS News and Notes Frontiers in Science
About the Newsletter Editors Science and Technology in Congress is a newsletter produced by the AAAS Office of Government Relations to provide timely, objective information to Congress on current science and technology issues. To Subscribe: Please send an e-mail with the subject line "Subscribe," your name and address to congress_center@aaas.org. Joanne Padron Carney, Director, OGR Erin Heath, Associate Director, OGR

Sequester in Review

In spite of substantial debate and controversy over the impacts of indiscriminate, across-the-board cuts in the days leading up to the deadline, sequestration went into effect on March 1 as required by law. Cuts to defense and nondefense R&D will total an estimated $9.0 billion to the FY 2013 federal R&D budget. These cuts will place a particularly acute burden on government agencies, as they must be implemented nearly five months into the fiscal year.

As widely expected, Congress failed to pass a balanced alternative deficit reduction plan to replace the sequester. The House of Representatives, however, did pass an appropriations bill (H.R. 933) that would fund the federal government for the remainder of the 2013 fiscal year. The legislation, which passed 267-151, would fund both defense and nondefense R&D at FY 2012 levels, although all R&D would remain subject to sequestration—a roughly 7.8% decrease for defense R&D and a 5.0% decrease for nondefense agency R&D. The House bill was written as an appropriations bill for the DOD and Veterans Affairs, but as a continuing resolution (CR) for the remaining agencies. This allowed the House to provide some flexibility to DOD and Veterans on how each could allocate the sequester cuts.

On March 11, the Senate Appropriations Committee released its revised version of the House bill. Both Appropriations Chairwoman Barbara Mikulski (D-MD) and Ranking Member Richard Shelby (R-AL) agreed to the legislation that would continue to fund the government for the remainder of the fiscal year. The revised "hybrid" bill does not eliminate the sequestration but does expand upon the House version by including additional flexibility for the Departments of Justice, Homeland Security, Agriculture, and Commerce, as well as NASA and NSF. The bill also includes a small increase ($71 million, pre-sequestration cut) for the National Institutes of Health. On March 20, the Senate voted 73-26 to pass its version of the Continuing Appropriations Act. The Act includes an Amendment submitted by Senator Tom Coburn (R-OK) that limits funding for political science research at the NSF; specifically, the agency will only be able to fund political science research if it is certified by the NSF director as “promoting national security or the economic interests of the United States.” The next day, the House of
Representatives voted 318-109 to approve the Senate’s changes.

-- Sara Spizzirri and Matt Hourihan

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President Releases Budget

The White House released its FY 2014 budget request on April 10. The President proposes a $3.8 trillion budget in FY 2014, projecting a $744 billion deficit. In R&D funding, the budget calls for $144.1 billion, including $69.7 billion for basic and applied research. In general terms, the budget shows a marked shift from defense to nondefense R&D, and from development to research. Perhaps most notable for R&D funding, however, is the President’s proposal to roll back sequestration. Provisions in the Budget Control Act currently cap discretionary spending at $966 billion in FY 2014, a level House Republicans have embraced. However, the President’s budget – and Senate Democrats – proposes returning the discretionary spending limit to pre-sequester level of $1.057 trillion. Resolving this $91 billion difference is key for R&D funding, as the President’s budget is predicated on the higher spending level.

Failing to raise the cap would likely leave FY 2014 looking much like FY 2013, when R&D funding fell by more than $9 billion, or 6.7 percent, below the prior year, according to AAAS estimates. This decline comes on the heels of cuts in prior years, resulting in a three-year R&D decline of roughly 17 percent. This represents the largest relative decline in federal R&D funding in 40 years. While some of the reductions in FY 2013 were due to funding cuts in final appropriations, the majority of it was the result of sequestration. Some agencies did appear to fare better than others in the final summation. For instance, the National Science Foundation (NSF), the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), the National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA) and the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) all received funding boosts that partially or fully offset sequestration.

Because FY 2013 appropriations came a full six months late, the Administration delayed its own FY 2014 request until April. Compared against post-sequester FY 2013 estimates, the budget proposes substantial increases across virtually every major agency. Even compared against FY 2012 – the last year prior to sequestration – the budget would boost nondefense R&D spending by 5.2 percent after inflation, and cut defense R&D by 9.5 percent. Research funding would also receive a corresponding boost as development activities – mostly within the Department of Defense – are cut.

In inflation-adjusted dollars, the Administration proposes a combined 4.9 percent increase above FY 2012 for R&D at the America COMPETES agencies (NSF, NIST and the Department of Energy's Office of Science); a 4.2 increase for USDA, including a nearly 50 percent increase for extramural research; and a near-doubling of the DHS R&D budget for construction of the National Bio- and Agrodefense Facility in Manhattan, Kansas. However, the budget also cuts 2.4 percent from NIH, 1.4 percent from NASA, and 5.4 percent from EPA. Many of the key increases are reserved for targeted programs intended to drive technological innovation, including smart systems, materials, and cyberinfrastructure research at NSF; the Space Technology mission at NASA; the Clean Energy Manufacturing Initiative at the Department of Energy; and the National Center for Advancing Translational Science within NIH. DOD’s R&D budget would decline substantially, though basic research funding would increase.

While the budget continues to make investments in the Administration’s priority research areas, the overriding question is whether Congress can agree to a deal that raises the discretionary spending ceiling to make the President’s budget work. Barring an agreement, FY 2014 would end up looking similar to FY 2013, with billions of dollars in lost R&D falling victim to the nation’s fiscal challenges.

-- Matt Hourihan

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Budget Proposal Consolidates Education Programs

The Obama Administration has proposed a reorganization of science, technology, engineering and math (STEM) education programs in what it says is an effort to more efficiently manage the $3 million that the federal government spends each year on science education, public outreach, and training programs for new scientists and engineers.

The President’s FY 2014 budget outlines a plan for reducing the number of active STEM programs from 226 to 112; 78 programs would be eliminated altogether, and 49 would be consolidated. The consolidated programs would be run under the auspices of one of three agencies: the Department of Education would manage precollege science and math education programs, the National Science Foundation would manage undergraduate and graduate STEM training, and the Smithsonian Institution would manage any extracurricular STEM activities.

Although there would be budget cuts for specific agencies that would lose their STEM programs—most notably NASA, the National Institutes of Health, and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration—the budget calls for a $3.1 billion investment in STEM education programs, a 6.7 percent increase from FY 2012 levels. The Department of Education alone would receive a 4.6 percent increase from FY 2012 levels, to fund, among other things, a new Master STEM Teacher Corps Initiative, and the STEM Teacher Pathways program, which was designed to prepare 100,000 new STEM teachers for the workforce in the next ten years.

This proposal comes in the wake of a 2012 GAO report that found that 83 percent of federally managed STEM programs overlapped to some extent, but less than half of these programs were coordinated with other agencies. The GAO also reported that agencies were not evaluating the success of their programs adequately.

-- Sara Spizzirri

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Congress In Brief