(This
analysis is a preview of the DHS chapter in the forthcoming AAAS Report XXXII:
Research and Development FY 2008, a comprehensive look at the President's
budget for R&D in FY 2008. This analysis contains revised AAAS estimates of
DHS R&D, different from figures originally presented in the President's budget.
More tables and continually updated supplemental materials on R&D in the FY
2008 budget can be found on the AAAS R&D Web site at http://www.aaas.org/spp/rd.)
Highlights
-
The Department of Homeland Security’s (DHS) R&D portfolio fell sharply
in 2007 because of rising congressional dissatisfaction with the new department’s
R&D efforts, and would edge down another 0.8 percent to $996 million in 2008,
even as total DHS funding continues to increase (see Table II-6).
-
While research on radiological and nuclear countermeasures would continue to climb
17 percent to $320 million in the newly separate Domestic Nuclear Detection Office
(DNDO), R&D in the main Science and Technology Directorate would fall steeply
for the second year.
-
The newly restructured S&T Directorate would cut funding for most R&D
areas, but the new Innovation program to develop revolutionary technological breakthroughs
would see its funding jump from $38 million to $60 million.
-
University and Fellowship Programs funding would fall again to $39 million, down
a third in two years. DHS would support 11 university-based centers by 2008.
DHS R&D in the FY 2008 Budget
The still-new Department of Homeland Security
(DHS) continues to lead the government effort against terrorism and to coordinate
government-wide responses to man-made as well as natural disasters, but is experiencing
growing pains as it tries to coordinate its many activities and execute its many
missions. The department’s missteps in responding to the 2005 hurricane season
are already well known, but the department has also struggled to ramp up its R&D
activities and to link them to mission goals. After starting from virtually nothing
four years ago and rapidly becoming the seventh-largest R&D funding agency,
the department’s Science and Technology (S&T) unit ran into trouble spending
money, knowing where the money went, and linking R&D to the technology requirements
of DHS operating units. Under the leadership of Undersecretary of S&T Jay
Cohen, the new head of the DHS S&T Directorate, the entire DHS R&D operation
is undergoing an extensive reorganization. Meanwhile, increasing congressional
dissatisfaction over DHS’ R&D programs and financial management prompted Congress
to cut DHS R&D dramatically by 23 percent in 2007 after several years of equally
dramatic growth. DHS R&D would
level off in 2008 at $996 million, down 0.8 percent (see Table II-6).
But the 2008 budget as presented could be a placeholder until Cohen’s reorganization
is complete, so the final 2008 appropriation could look very different from this
request. (Note: The AAAS estimates of DHS R&D in Table II-6 differ significantly
from R&D data in the Budget of the U.S. Government
FY 2008. AAAS has corrected
inaccurate codings of non-R&D programs as R&D,
added back some R&D funding left out of the Budget, and removed some non-R&D
programs from the R&D data after examination of DHS budget documents.)
In
FY 2006, nearly all DHS R&D programs had their home in the Directorate of Science and Technology (S&T),
but nearly a third of the DHS R&D
portfolio would be outside S&T in the 2008 budget. This Directorate
has responsibility for setting homeland-security R&D goals and priorities,
coordinating homeland security R&D throughout the federal government, funding
homeland security R&D, facilitating the transfer and deployment of technologies
for homeland security, and advising the DHS Secretary on all scientific and technical
matters. The S&T Directorate’s R&D funding would total $656 million in
2008, down 7.9 percent from 2007 and just half last year’s budget as it continues
to retrench from the too-rapid growth of previous years.
Figure 1. (click on the image for
PDF)
Radiological and nuclear countermeasures R&D in the new Domestic
Nuclear Detection Office (DNDO) would be the largest part of the DHS R&D portfolio
in 2008 (see Figure 1), with nearly a third of the total investment.
DNDO was created out of the S&T Directorate in the middle of FY 2006 and is
now a stand-alone entity devoted to radiological and nuclear countermeasures.
Its mainly applied research portfolio would climb 17 percent to $320 million in
2008 within a total budget of $562 million, also up 17 percent. (The difference
between the two totals is procurement of nuclear detection devices for U.S. ports of entry, and management costs.) The largest
increases would be for transformational R&D to try to develop breakthrough
methods of detecting radiological and nuclear threats in operational settings
and for systems development of new Advanced Spectroscopic Portal (APS) systems.
R&D
against weapons of mass destruction dominates the DHS R&D portfolio when DNDO
R&D on radiological and nuclear countermeasures is combined with defenses
against biological, chemical, and explosives threats in S&T (see Figure 1).
The S&T reorganization in progress combines the formerly separate chemical
and biological portfolios into a single program; within the program, construction
of the National Biodefense Analysis and Countermeasures
Center (NBACC) continues toward a target completion date of 2008. NBACC will be
part of a biodefense complex of DHS, NIH, and DOD facilities
at Fort Detrick, Maryland. The program would transfer operations of the BioWatch
and other surveillance systems to a new unit in DHS, and would concentrate on
R&D toward the next generation of biological and chemical detection and surveillance
capabilities. Explosives countermeasures funding would fall nearly 40 percent
to $64 million, down nearly three-quarters from 2006 (see Table
II-6) as a concentrated burst of development activities to defend against
shoulder-fired aircraft missiles winds down and transitions to deployment on commercial
aircraft.
The
Innovation portfolio to develop breakthrough technologies and highly innovative
approaches to homeland security problems would receive the largest increase in
S&T, up $22 million to $60 million. Among the technologies this new program
will tackle are tunnel detection devices, improvised explosive devices, critical
infrastructure resiliency, and new ways of defeating shoulder-fired anti-aircraft
missiles.
Funding
for University and Fellowship Programs would fall $10 million to $39 million in
2008, after a similar cut in 2007. This program funds university-based Centers
of Excellence that are multi-year university consortia to perform R&D on homeland
security-related topics and also fellowships to encourage U.S. students to pursue scientific and technical degrees
in areas of study related to homeland security. There are now seven DHS Centers of Excellence, and another four (on the areas of explosives detection,
mitigation, and response; border security and immigration; maritime, island, and
extreme/remote environment security; and natural disasters, coastal infrastructure,
and emergency management) are open for competition in the current fiscal year.
Two of the existing seven centers are cooperative centers, one a DHS-EPA effort
and the other a DHS-Lawrence Livermore (DOE) collaboration.
Impacts
of the DHS R&D Portfolio
Recently,
DHS released its first data set on how it spent its initial R&D budgets. As
shown in Figure 2, DHS R&D is concentrated geographically, with three states
and the District
of Columbia
accounting for the majority of DHS R&D funding in 2004. Though it is likely
that DC’s share is due to headquarters funds that eventually went to other states,
Maryland and Virginia clearly benefit from the heavy concentration of
contractors in the Washington, DC
area, while California and New Mexico benefit from the primarily DOE-affiliated national
laboratories located in these states.
Figure 2. (click on the image for
PDF)
Figure 3. (click on the image for
PDF)
DHS
research, excluding development funding, is heavily oriented to the life sciences
and engineering, not surprising since biological countermeasures dominated the
early days of DHS R&D. Fully two-thirds of DHS investments in basic and applied
research go to these two disciplines, with the remainder devoted mostly to the
physical sciences (see Figure 3). This portfolio is expected to shift in 2007
and 2008 as the emphasis shifts away from biological countermeasures toward the
radiological and nuclear countermeasures portfolio. The total research portfolio
is expected to grow as well, as research becomes a larger part of DHS R&D
and development funding shrinks.
Recent
Historical Trends in DHS R&D
DHS
R&D, after a rapid ramp-up phase, by all accounts grew too rapidly and is
now in retrenchment and reorganization. As shown in Figure 4, DHS began life with
only a few R&D laboratories and programs that it inherited from USDA, DOE,
and DOD, unlike the massive transfer of personnel and capabilities that happened
in the rest of the new department. From a transfer of less than $300 million of
programs in 2002, DHS began rapidly creating new R&D capabilities after its
foundation in FY 2003 (see Figure 4), adding portfolios on long-neglected technology
areas to address homeland security, establishing relationships with existing national
laboratories and federal laboratories, and setting up new structures for funding
external R&D. In the past few years, DHS has set up an Office for National
Laboratories that coordinates DHS interactions with DOE national laboratories
possessing expertise in homeland security. DHS has also set up its own FFRDC,
the Homeland Security Institute (HSI), and has also consolidated R&D activities
at laboratories it inherited from other departments. The extramural R&D portfolio
in the S&T directorate is now managed by the
Homeland Security Advanced Research Projects Agency (HSARPA), modeled on
the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) in the Department of Defense
(DOD). HSARPA awards extramural grants for basic and applied research to promote
revolutionary changes in homeland security technologies; develops and tests potential
homeland security technologies; and accelerates or prototypes the development
of homeland security technologies to get them ready for deployment. HSARPA administers
DHS’ Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) program, which provides competitively
awarded exploratory and development grants to small businesses.
Figure 4. (click on the image for
PDF)
But
after DHS finished its start-up phase in 2005, budget growth slowed down in 2006
and the S&T directorate struggled, prompting Congress to slash its funding
dramatically in 2007 and impose numerous restrictions and demands. In the
2007 appropriations process, a congressional report described the directorate
as “a rudderless ship without a clear way to get back on course,” criticized its
lack of clear research goals, absence of detailed budget information, mystifying
accounting conventions, and even an inability to spend past appropriations it
had been given. The final 2007 appropriations bill rescinded $125 million previously
appropriated R&D funds that have never been obligated, made program cuts in
most areas, and required S&T to submit a five-year research plan with priorities,
performance measures, and resource needs for each R&D area before it could
spend a $60 million chunk of its 2007 R&D funds. Congress separately withheld
$60 million in 2007 S&T management costs funding until a detailed accounting
of overhead and management costs for the R&D portfolio had been delivered.
Undersecretary
for Science and Technology Jay Cohen was sworn in as the new S&T directorate
leader in August 2006, midway through the bruising 2007 appropriations season
and also midway through the internal deliberations on the 2008 budget. The public
presentation of the 2008 budget marks the new leadership’s first budget proposal,
but Cohen has made it clear that his reorganization of S&T is still a work
in progress. As the 2008 proposal goes to Congress, appropriators will no doubt
keep a sharp eye on these reorganization efforts and will be looking for signs
that S&T is better able to spend its funds wisely.
(More
materials on R&D in the FY 2008 budget, historical data and charts, and more
information on AAAS Report XXXII: Research and Development FY 2008, can
be found on the AAAS R&D Web site at http://www.aaas.org/spp/rd.)
-
February 23, 2007
AAAS R&D Budget and Policy Program
1200 New York Avenue,
NW
Washington, DC 20005
(202) 326-6607
AAAS R&D Web site: http://www.aaas.org/spp/rd
