Last week (July 18), the Senate Appropriations Committee
approved a draft version of its FY 2001 Commerce-Justice appropriations
bill that would provide increases for most Department of Commerce R&D
programs. The full House approved its version of the bill on June 26.
Its version would make deep cuts to Commerce R&D. President Clinton
has threatened to veto both versions of the bill, primarily because
each contains cuts to non-Commerce programs and because of non-spending
legislative provisions. The Senate Commerce bill would cut Commerce
R&D by 2.7 percent or $29 million for a total of $1.0 billion, but
the cut would be for one program only, allowing most R&D programs
to receive increases (see Table). The
Senate would depart sharply from the House's proposed $816 million R&D
appropriation, a 24.0 percent cut spread across all the major R&D
programs. The Senate bill would increase R&D in the National Oceanic
and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) and in the intramural and extramural
R&D programs of the National Institute of Standards and Technology
(NIST). In NIST, the Senate would join the House in providing no
funds for a proposed new Institute for Information Infrastructure
Protection (IIIP) and would agree to requested cuts in the Construction
of Research Facilities program.
(For details of House appropriations for Commerce R&D,
please see the June 16 AAAS R&D Funding Update.)
The Senate Commerce-Justice bill would provide less for discretionary appropriations than either the request or the House version, but within the smaller total the Senate would provide more for Commerce R&D programs than the House, and would instead provide far less than both the House and the request for certain Department of Justice programs and international programs.
The Senate would provide $414 million for National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) R&D, far more than the $270 million House appropriation, though less than the request for $497 million. The overall total would be a decline of 9.6 percent because the Senate would join the House in slashing funding for NIST's Construction of Research Facilities program from $107 million, down to $29 million in the Senate and $26 million in the House. Although NIST itself only requested $36 million for FY 2001 because most of the FY 2000 funding was a one-time appropriation to fund the construction of a new Advanced Measurement Laboratory (AML) at NIST headquarters in Maryland, the House and Senate would cut even below the reduced request for FY 2001. Doing so, however, would free up money for NIST's other programs. NIST intramural laboratory research programs would grow by 8.1 percent to $255 million for R&D in the Measurement and Standards Laboratories.
The Senate would boost funding for R&D in the Advanced Technology Program (ATP) by $15 million or 12.8 percent to $130 million. While this would fall short of the request, it would be far better for ATP than the House, which voted to eliminate the program. ATP is NIST's extramural research grants program to provide precompetitive cost-shared R&D support for promising market technologies. The House has repeatedly voted to terminate the program, including in last year's Commerce-Justice bill, but the Senate and the Clinton Administration have managed to preserve it in past budget struggles. Many Republicans regard the ATP as "corporate welfare," a subsidy to industrial firms that unnecessarily funds research private firms could and should support, but it appears that in House-Senate conference ATP will survive again, though most likely at a funding level below the Senate proposal.
Neither the House nor the Senate would provide funds
for a proposed Institute for Information Infrastructure Protection (IIIP),
in contrast to the request for $50 million out of which $44 million
would fund R&D. IIIP would support research and technology development
to protect critical information and telecommunications infrastructures
from attack or other failures. IIIP plans to foster partnerships between
industry, universities, and government through competitively awarded
research grants, mostly to external performers, but these plans would
be canceled under the House and Senate plans. Because the House and
Senate are in agreement, it is unlikely the funds will be restored in
conference.
The total NIST budget in the Senate bill would be $597 million (for both R&D and non-R&D programs), down 6.2 percent from FY 2000, but far above the one-third proposed cut in the House bill.
The Senate would boost funding for the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA)'s R&D programs with an R&D appropriation of $606 million in FY 2001, an increase of $15 million or 2.5 percent over FY 2000. The House would cut NOAA R&D steeply. The Senate would boost funding for NOAA's main R&D account, Oceanic and Atmospheric Research (OAR), from $301 million in FY 2000 to $304 million, compared to a House appropriation of only $265 million. In the past several years, the House has often proposed cuts to NOAA R&D programs, while the Senate has advocated large increases, with the final result often a compromise between the two.
The Commerce-Justice bill now heads to the Senate floor, but it is unlikely to be approved by the full Senate before the August recess, which starts Friday (July 28). The bill will most likely reach the floor in September. President Clinton has threatened to veto the bill because it would make cuts to the President's request for international peacekeeping operations and because the bill contains a provision that would effectively prohibit the Department of Justice from pursuing a lawsuit against tobacco companies to recover some health care costs associated with smoking. A similar provision was originally in the House version of the bill, but was removed on the House floor; President Clinton still threatens to veto the House bill, however, because of its sharp cuts to legal aid, international, and commerce programs. It is widely expected that later on in the budget process this fall, Congress will decide to allocate more funds to this bill to bring its totals closer to the President's request and will remove the tobacco provision, and it is likely that the final funding levels for Commerce programs will end up close to the Senate levels and perhaps higher.
- July 26, 2000
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
