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Go to: Table.
Commerce R&D in FY 2000 House-Senate Conference
PDF version of this document
Related sites:
AAAS R&D Funding Update August 5- House
Cuts Commerce R&D by 22 Percent, Eliminates ATP (House
appropriations for FY 2000 Commerce)
AAAS R&D Funding Update June 16- Senate
Proposes Large Increases for Commerce R&D (Senate appropriations
for FY 2000 Commerce)
AAAS Report XXIV: R&D FY 2000
President's Request for FY 2000
Chapter 13:
R&D in Selected Agencies
- Kei Koizumi, AAAS
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(The complete series of AAAS R&D Funding Updates,
including continually updated analyses of R&D by agency in FY 2000
appropriations, is available on the AAAS R&D Web Site (http://www.aaas.org/spp/R&D)
in the "FY 2000 R&D" or the "What's
New" sections.)
Today, the House narrowly gave final approval to an
FY 2000 Commerce-Justice appropriations bill (HR 2670) that gives a
small increase to the Department of Commerce's R&D programs. Even
if the Senate approves the bill tomorrow, the President has threatened
to veto it because of inadequate funding for some of his crime and international
priorities. The Commerce bill provides a $25 million or 2.4 percent
increase for R&D in the Department of Commerce, for a total of $1.1
billion in FY 2000 (see Table). The
bill provides moderate increases for R&D in both of Commerce's major
R&D agencies, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration
(NOAA) and the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST).
Although FY 2000 started on October 1, Congress is
still struggling to draft the 13 appropriations bills within discretionary
spending caps that are forcing sharp cuts to domestic discretionary
programs. The discretionary spending caps, enacted in 1997, require
FY 2000 discretionary spending to be nearly $20 billion below FY 1999
funding levels. Thanks to billions of dollars in emergency spending
for the 2000 Census and cuts to requested levels for international programs
in the Department of State and policing programs in the Department of
Justice, the final Commerce-Justice bill manages to stay within tight
budget totals while still providing increases for priority programs.
Although many Commerce programs receive increases,
the bulk of Commerce's $8.7 billion budget goes to the 2000 Census.
The final bill contains $4.8 billion for the Bureau of the Census in
FY 2000, far above the FY 1999 total of $1.3 billion. $4.5 billion of
this amount goes toward costs of the 2000 Census, and is designated
as emergency to exempt it from budget caps. Earlier in the year, the
Census Bureau had assumed that statistical sampling could be
used to fill in some missing data gaps from unreturned census questionnaires
and to produce a more accurate population count, but the Supreme Court
ruled earlier this year that statistical sampling could not be used
to produce population figures for congressional apportionment. The appropriation,
significantly above the $3.1 billion requested in February, should allow
the Bureau to perform a more comprehensive actual enumeration, while
still leaving itself the option of using statistical sampling to produce
population figures for non-apportionment purposes.
The final Commerce bill provides modest increases for
Commerce's R&D programs, a middle ground between substantial increases
in the Senate bill and deep cuts in the House bill. The National
Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) receives $475 million
for its R&D activities in FY 2000, a modest $7 million or 1.4 percent
above FY 1999. The Senate would have given NIST a spectacular increase
of 20.4 percent for NIST R&D, while the House would have cut NIST
R&D by 38 percent. While the NIST intramural laboratory research
programs grow modestly by 1.1 percent to $236 million, the Advanced
Technology Program (ATP) receives $131 million for R&D activities,
a cut of $48 million or 16.7 percent. ATP is NIST's extramural research
grants program to provide precompetitive cost-shared R&D support
for promising market technologies. The House would have eliminated the
program, while the Senate would have cut it slightly from the FY 1999
funding level. The large cut to ATP is balanced by a large increase
for NIST's Construction of Research Facilities account. Its $108 million
appropriation is nearly double the FY 1999 level. Most of this appropriation
will fund the start of construction of a new Advanced Measurement Laboratory
(AML) at NIST headquarters in Maryland. The total NIST budget in the
Commerce-Justice bill is $639 million, down 1.3 percent from FY 1999.
The non-R&D Manufacturing Extension Partnership (MEP), a
program to operate a nationwide network of extension centers to disseminate
better manufacturing technologies to small- and medium-sized manufacturers,
receives $105 million, down slightly from FY 1999.
The Commerce-Justice bill awards the National Oceanic
and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) an R&D budget of $619
million in FY 2000, an increase of $19 million or 3.1 percent over both
FY 1999 and the FY 2000 request. NOAA's R&D programs on oceans,
atmosphere, marine resources, and the environment would have received
a 12.4 percent increase in the Senate version of the bill and an 8.9
percent cut in the House version, but as with NIST the final appropriation
is a compromise. The final bill cuts many NOAA R&D programs, but
awards an increase to the Oceanic and Atmospheric Research (OAR)
account, from $287 million in FY 1999 to $300 million in FY 2000. The
bill boosts climate and air quality research from $122 million to $129
million. This program funds, among other topics, NOAA research on climate
models to better predict severe weather events such as El Niño
and La Niña. The bill also provides increases for OAR activities
in weather research, ocean research, and Great Lakes research.
Figure 1.
The FY 2000 increase, slightly ahead of the expected
inflation rate, keeps Commerce R&D at a stable funding level (see
Figure 1). Mostly because of strong Clinton Administration support for
NIST programs, and secondarily because of bipartisan support for NOAA's
R&D programs in the early 1990s, Commerce R&D in FY 2000 is
more than double the funding level of a decade ago (in inflation-adjusted
terms). Commerce is now one of seven agencies to fund more than $1 billion
in R&D annually. However, in recent years Commerce R&D peaked
in FY 1995 and has been up and down since then because partisan disagreements
on the proper role of the federal government in commercial technology
have made ATP a contentious political issue, and because tight discretionary
spending caps have limited the pool of money available for NIST and
NOAA.
Figure 2.
Figure 3.
Because of the differing missions of NOAA and NIST,
Commerce has a diverse research portfolio, as shown in Figure 2. Although
Commerce is not the dominant supporter of research in any one discipline,
it does provide significant amounts of research funding for several
disciplines. NOAA is a leading supporter of research in the life sciences
and especially the environmental sciences, including atmospheric and
oceanographic research. NIST is a leading supporter of research in the
physical sciences (including chemistry and physics), computer sciences,
and the engineering sciences. Most of NOAA's and NIST's research is
performed in intramural laboratories.
Commerce funding for many of these disciplines has
stagnated or declined in recent years because of continuing disputes
over the proper role of NIST in funding R&D and stagnant funding
for NOAA within tight discretionary budgets. The trends shown in Figure
1 are mirrored in trends for Commerce support of specific disciplines,
as shown in Figure 3. NOAA's support of environmental sciences and life
sciences has declined in tandem with losses in purchasing power in NOAA's
overall R&D budget, although funding levels are still higher than
they were in the early 1990s. NIST dramatically expanded its support
of engineering, physical sciences, and computer sciences research in
the early 1990s. But since 1995, when the Republican Congress began
casting a harshly critical eye to NIST's activities (especially ATP),
its support of these disciplines has stagnated or declined. The increase
in Commerce's R&D in FY 2000 is too small to reverse these downward
trends.
The Commerce-Justice bill won House approval by the
narrowest of margins (215-213) because of its cuts to international
and justice programs, so Senate approval is uncertain. For the same
reason, President Clinton has threatened to veto the bill if it reaches
his desk. If it is vetoed, the bill becomes a likely candidate to be
rolled into an omnibus appropriations bill, and it is highly uncertain
whether funding levels for Commerce's R&D programs will stay the
same. Congress may reallocate funds within the bill to satisfy the President's
demands, and in addition Congress is seriously considering enacting
across-the-board cuts in discretionary spending to get all FY 2000 appropriations
under budget targets.
- October 20, 1999
AAAS R&D Budget and Policy Program
American Association for the Advancement of Science
1200 New York Ave, NW
Washington, DC 20005
(202) 326-6607
science_policy@aaas.org
http://www.aaas.org/spp/R&D
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