Highlights-
The Senate Appropriations Committee has drafted a spending bill that would match
the Bush Administration’s request for a 12.5 percent increase in the National
Science Foundation (NSF) budget for 2009 to $6.9 billion (see Table),
a large increase designed to keep NSF on track to double its budget between 2006
and 2016. NSF’s R&D investments would total $5.2 billion in the Senate
plan, a 15.1 percent increase to an all-time high in real terms.
- The Senate would agree with NSF in giving
all of NSF’s research directorates large increases in 2009 after flat funding
in 2008 (see Figure 2). The 2009 NSF request and now the Senate bill clearly favor
the physical sciences, with requested increases approaching 20 percent for the
Mathematics and Physical Sciences (MPS; up 20 percent), Engineering (ENG; up 19
percent), and Computer and Information Science and Engineering (CISE; up 19 percent)
directorates (see Table). The Biological Sciences (BIO; up 10 percent), Geosciences
(GEO; up 12 percent), and especially the Social, Behavioral and Economic Sciences
(SBE; up 8 percent) would lag behind but would narrowly match past funding levels.
- NSF’s education and human resources programs
would gain 3.3 percent to $790 million in 2009, on top of $40 million these programs
just received in the current year as part of a 2008 supplemental bill.
NSF R&D
in FY 2009 Senate Appropriations
On
June 19, the Senate Appropriations Committee approved its version of the FY 2009
Commerce-Justice-Science (CJS) appropriations bill (S 3182) providing funding
for the Department of Commerce, the National Science
Foundation (NSF), and the National Aeronautics and Space
Administration (NASA), for consideration by the full Senate in July. The House
approved its own version of the bill on June 25; full details of the House version
will be available shortly. Both the House and Senate bills contain close to $57
billion in 2009 discretionary spending,
$5 to $6 billion more than the current year and between $3 and $4 billion more
than the President’s request for these programs.
In his budget proposal for FY 2009, President Bush
would follow through on his 2006 call to substantially increase funding for key
physical sciences research agencies over ten years as part of an “American Competitiveness
Initiative” (ACI) by keeping the NSF budget on track to double between 2006 and
2016, despite appropriations setbacks in 2007 and 2008. NSF is one of three agencies
(the others are the Department of Energy (DOE) Office of Science, and the National
Institute of Standards and Technology laboratories) favored with large requested
increases as part of the ACI. In drafting the CJS bill, the Senate Appropriations
Committee would match the request and would give NSF a total budget of $6.9
billion in FY 2009, $759 million or 12.5 percent more than 2008 (see Table).
(The requested increase was originally reported as 13.6 percent, but on June 30
NSF received $62.5 million in additional 2008 funding as part of the war-related
supplemental bill, thus increasing the 2008 base.) Although increases for
NSF’s physical sciences-related programs would lead the pack, there would be increases
across the entire NSF research portfolio, which spans the range of science and
engineering disciplines, and increases for NSF’s education and human resources
programs as well. The broad-based increases in the 2009 budget and the 2009 Senate
appropriation could have a major impact on nearly all science and engineering
disciplines, especially at universities.
After adjusting for inflation, the 2009 Senate
appropriation and request would bring the NSF budget to an all-time high in inflation-adjusted
terms (see Figure 1). After peaking in 2004, NSF funding fell in 2005 and
2006 but rose in 2007 and 2008 after Congress approved some though not all of
the Bush Administration’s requested ACI increases. The robust 2009 increase would
still fall slightly short of the authorized funding level of $7.3 billion enacted
in the America COMPETES Act of August 2007.
NSF’s R&D
funding, which excludes NSF’s education and training activities and overhead costs
(such as polar logistics and administrative salaries), would total $5.2 billion
in the Senate plan, a gain of 15.1 percent or $679 million that would also be
an all-time high (see Table and Figure 1).
Figure 1. (click on the image for PDF)
NSF’s main Research
and Related Activities (R&RA) account, which funds nearly all of NSF’s
basic and applied research and contains NSF’s discipline-based research directorates,
would increase 15.9 percent to $5.6 billion in both the Senate appropriation and
the NSF budget request (see Table). All of NSF’s research directorates would
receive large increases in 2009 after flat funding in 2008, and all would recover
from budget cuts after 2004 to reach all-time highs in inflation-adjusted dollars
(see Figure 2). Both NSF and the Senate would clearly favor the physical sciences,
with increases approaching 20 percent for the largest Mathematics and Physical
Sciences (MPS) directorate (up 20 percent to $1.4 billion), the Engineering (ENG)
directorate (up 19 percent to $757 million), and the Computer and Information
Science and Engineering (CISE) directorate (up 19 percent to $637 million; see
Table). The Office of Cyberinfrastructure (OCI) would
also see a strong gain with an 18 percent boost to $219 million. OCI supports
the procurement, development, and operation of state-of-the-art cyberinfrastructure
resources for the entire research community.
The increases would be smaller but still substantial
for other NSF research directorates away from the physical sciences. The Biological
Sciences (BIO; up 10 percent to $673 million), Geosciences (GEO; up 12 percent
to $846 million), and especially the Social, Behavioral and Economic Sciences
(SBE; up 8 percent to $233 million) would lag behind in percentage terms, but
all would narrowly manage to match past funding levels in real dollars (see Figure
2), although funding for the SBE directorate has just barely kept pace with inflation
this decade.
Within R&RA, the Senate would add $11 million
to the request for Integrative Activities (IA) for a 23 percent increase to $287
million for its cross-disciplinary suite of programs. There would be a large 23
percent increase to $115 million for Major Research Instrumentation (MRI), a program
to distribute competitively awarded instrumentation grants to institutions for
state-of-the-art research instrumentation that would be too costly to be funded
through regular NSF research awards. The other large increase in IA would go to
the Science and Technology Centers program (from $1 million this year to $16 million
in 2009) to support a competition in 2009 to name five to seven new centers for
multidisciplinary centers integrating research, education, workforce development,
and technology transfer. The Senate would boost the Experimental Program to Stimulate
Competitive Research (EPSCoR) program to $125 million, $10 million more than this
year. EPSCoR assists research institutions and states that have traditionally
been underrepresented in federal R&D funding to build research capacity. The
program is currently open to 25 states, Puerto Rico, and the U.S. Virgin Islands; collectively, the
EPSCoR states received just 10.4 percent of NSF R&D funds in FY 2004. But
the Senate, despite its generosity, expresses its concern over the strength and
effectiveness of the EPSCoR program and calls for a comprehensive review of the
program, including recommendations for improving it and criteria for when a state
might graduate (to date, no state has lost its EPSCoR eligibility).
Figure 2. (click on the image for PDF)
NSF R&D facilities funding would be one of
the few areas in the 2009 NSF budget to decline. The Major Research Equipment
and Facilities Construction (MREFC) budget would fall $53 million or 26 percent
to $152 million in the Senate plan (see Table), $5 million more than the request.
From funding 7 projects in 2008, the 2009 budget would fund only 3 construction
projects and one new design project, although 4 more
projects would inch along with previously appropriated funds. MREFC funds only
the construction of large scientific facilities; smaller facilities projects,
planning and design for future facilities, research instrumentation grants, and
facilities operations are funded in R&RA by the research directorates. In
2009, NSF would ramp up construction of the Advanced Laser Interferometer Gravitational
Wave Observatory (AdvLIGO), an upgrade to the existing LIGO in Washington and West
Virginia of
the world’s most sophisticated optical interferometers, with a $51 million allocation.
The Atacama Large Millimeter Array (ALMA) would receive $82 million for its eighth
year of funding out of a planned 11, and construction of the IceCube project in
Antarctica would begin winding down with $11 million in 2009
toward full operations in 2011. A small $2.5 million request would initiate design
work on the Advanced Technology Solar Telescope (ATST); the Senate would give
ATST $7 million in MREFC and $2.5 million in R&RA.
NSF education and human resources programs would
increase $25 million or 3.3 percent to $790 million in the Senate appropriation,
but would remain 16 percent below 2004 levels in real terms after bottoming out
in 2007 from steep cuts in 2005 and 2006 (see Figure 2). These programs just
received $40 million in current-year funding as part of the 2008 supplemental.
NSF Funding
Mechanisms
The large
proposed increases for the research directorates, now endorsed by the Senate,
would mean a year of gains to reverse recent declines in competitively awarded
research grants. Looking only at competitively
awarded research grants, NSF’s core funding mechanism, NSF expects to fund 8,880
research grants next year, an 18 percent increase after several years stuck near
7,500, while at the same time NSF hopes to increase the median award size to $123,575
(up 4.6 percent). After several years of declining success rates, NSF projects
that it will fund 23 percent of research grant proposals, up from 21 percent in
2008. The broad-based increases would allow every research directorate to increase
the three key measures of the number of research grants, the median grant size,
and the projected success rate. The 2009 increases could be slightly smaller in
percentage terms because the research directorates just received $22.5 million
in additional 2008 funding as part of the supplemental, enabling them to make
more awards in the remainder of this fiscal year.
Outlook and Next Steps
The full Senate
is expected to debate and approve the Commerce-Justice-Science bill in July, while
the House is also expected to consider its version in July. But there is increasing
doubt as to whether Congress will try to send a final version of the bill to President
Bush before the October 1 start of FY 2009. The President has threatened to veto
any 2009 appropriations bill that exceeds his request; since both the House and
Senate versions of the bill do so and since Congress is not inclined to do the
heavy lifting of negotiating a House-Senate compromise bill only to see it vetoed,
the bill may have a long way to go before its funding levels become final. As
was the case last year, the final funding outcome for NSF will depend on whether
the higher congressional bill total will prevail or whether, as was the case in
2008, Congress will rewrite the bill with lower funding levels to fit the President’s
budget totals.
(This
analysis is one of a series of AAAS R&D Funding Updates on FY 2009 congressional
appropriations. The complete series of AAAS R&D Funding Updates, including
continually updated analyses of R&D in FY 2009 appropriations, is available
on the AAAS R&D web site (http://www.aaas.org/spp/rd)
in the "FY 2009 R&D" or the "What's
New" sections.)
- July 1, 2008
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
