(This analysis is an update on progress
of the FY 2009 budget through Congress, and also an update of 2008 appropriations.
This analysis updates the recently released AAAS Report
XXXIII: Research and Development FY 2009, a comprehensive look at the
President's budget for R&D in FY 2009. 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.
This analysis will be revised in June after final 2008 supplemental and 2009
budget resolution action.)
Highlights
-
Congress is poised to add as much as $2.5 billion for Department of Defense
(DOD) weapons development in 2008 and 2009 as part of a war-related supplemental
bill, but at the moment only the Senate version of the bill contains $900 million
in domestic science funding.
-
Congress is ready to give final approval to its FY 2009 budget resolution, which
sets broad spending targets for later appropriations action. The congressional
budget resolution would add $21 billion to the President’s request for 2009 appropriations
for a total of $1.01 trillion.
R&D in the FY 2008 Supplemental Appropriations
Bill
Congress
is currently debating a $180+ billion 2008 and 2009 supplemental appropriations
bill, primarily to pay for ongoing war costs. The House and Senate are currently
considering separate versions, in the hopes of negotiating a compromise version
in early June for final congressional approval. The supplemental is required because
of the ongoing practice of paying for the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan outside
the regular appropriations process; the current supplemental would try to get
slightly ahead of the game by allocating nearly $70 billion in FY 2009 war funding
to pay for at least a few months of next year’s war costs in advance, in addition
to the $100 billion in FY 2008 war funding to pay for this year’s costs.
Although
supplementals normally pay for emergencies and other short-term expenses, there
is considerable R&D funding in both the House and Senate versions of the supplemental
bill. The House would give the Department of Defense (DOD) $2.4 billion in R&D
funding in FY 2008 and 2009, almost entirely for development funding with
a small portion for research. The House would not give domestic agencies any
supplemental R&D funding.
The
Senate would give domestic science programs $900 million in 2008 funding, most
of which would fund R&D. The Senate would give the National Institutes of
Health (NIH) $400 million, the Department of Energy (DOE) Office of Science $100
million, the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) $200 million,
and the National Science Foundation (NSF) $200 million. On the defense side,
the Senate supplemental would give DOD $2.5 billion in R&D funding
in FY 2008 and 2009, as with the House almost entirely for development with a
small portion for research.
The
Senate’s inclusion of $900 million in domestic science funding represents a partial
payoff on long months of campaigning by the biomedical and physical sciences communities.
NIH would receive $400 million in the Office of the Director (OD), which would
then distribute the funds to all the NIH institutes proportional to the institutes’
2008 allocations. A Senate press release indicated that the extra funds could
result in 700 additional research grant awards this year. DOE’s Office of Science
would receive $100 million, $55 million for Fusion Energy Sciences and $45 million
for High Energy Physics. The Fusion funding would enable DOE to rejoin the multi-national
International Thermonuclear Experimental Reactor (ITER) fusion project; December’s
2008 omnibus appropriations bill had originally zeroed out the U.S.
contribution for 2008. The High Energy
Physics funding could help to reverse some of the abrupt program cuts, project
terminations, and national lab layoffs that resulted from the 2008 omnibus bill’s
funding cuts. NSF’s Research and Related Activities (R&RA) account would receive
$150 million, to be distributed among all the research directorates to help boost
current-year funding of research grants, with $10 million set aside for the National
Academic Research Fleet to help pay for rising fuel costs. NSF’s Education and
Human Resources (EHR) programs would receive $50 million to supplement 2008 funding
that fell short of authorized levels in the Robert Noyce Scholarship program ($20
million), Graduate Research Fellowships ($24 million), Graduate Teaching Fellowships
($5 million), and the Federal Scholarship for Service ($1 million). NASA would
receive $200 million to replenish science accounts that have been drained over
the past several years to help pay for return to flight of the Space Shuttle after
the Columbia disaster. In addition
to the science funding above, DOE would also receive $248 million for environmental
cleanup activities and $52 million for uranium enrichment, while the CDC would
receive $26 million for the prevention of and response to medical errors, a portion
of which could fund research.
But
the Senate’s domestic science funding may not survive the next few weeks. The
House supplemental does not include domestic science funding, and the President
has in any case threatened to veto any supplemental bill that includes significant
non-war funding. Both the House and the President would have to agree with the
Senate in the next few weeks for the science appropriations to become law.
The
defense R&D supplementals, meanwhile, are almost certain to become law. Most
of these funds are part of the Pentagon’s and Bush Administration’s supplemental
requests for 2008 and 2009 and are thus not subject to a veto threat. The Senate
bill would give DOD’s RDT&E programs $1.7 billion in 2008 R&D funding
($163 million, Army; $366 million, Navy; $400 million, Air Force; $817 million,
Defense Wide) almost entirely for development (“6.3” and higher) activities plus
$365 million in 2008 applied research funding within Defense Health Programs for
battle casualty and psychological health research, traumatic brain injury research,
regenerative medicine, and disability evaluation research. The House bill would
be almost identical to the Senate at $1.6 billion, with the only difference $120
million less for the Air Force. Both the House and the Senate would give DOD an
identical $388 million for 2009 classified development funding ($113 million,
Army; $72 million, Navy; $203 million, Defense Wide), nearly identical to the
Pentagon request. The close matches between the House, the Senate, and DOD over
these R&D supplementals should ensure that these funds will get enacted nearly
intact in whatever form the final supplemental bill takes, and will bring total
DOD R&D funding in 2008 close to $80 billion, a new record.
In
a strange legislative maneuver, the congressional leadership has chosen to consider
this supplemental as three separate amendments to the 2008 Military Construction
appropriations bill (HR 2642), a bill that never made it to the President’s desk
but was instead rolled into the 2008 omnibus bill. One amendment contains war-related
funding; a second contains war-related policy language; and a third contains non-war
funding. The Senate is expected to approve all three amendments while stripping
out the original language, but the House failed to approve the war funding amendment
last week. Over the Memorial Day recess, congressional negotiators will try to
iron out compromises on the war funding and non-war funding amendments to get
a final bill, and may or may not include the policy language amendment. Sometime
in June, Congress hopes to give final approval to the supplemental and send it
to President Bush for his hoped-for signature, but may have to jettison policy
language and/or non-war funding along the way.
R&D
in the FY 2009 Budget Resolution
On
May 20, the Congress reached agreement on a final FY 2009 budget resolution (S.
Con. Res. 70) and hopes to gain final approval from both the House and the Senate
this week, a move that will allow the Appropriations Committees to begin work
on the FY 2009 appropriations bills. The budget resolution is an annual congressional
document that represents the congressional response to the President’s February
budget request, and provides a big-picture budget framework for all later congressional
budget decisions. The budget contains broad spending and revenue targets broken
down into smaller budget targets for various committees; its importance is in
the overall guidance it gives to the fragmented congressional process, and it
remains the only time Congress gets to consider the entire $3 trillion federal
budget as a whole. For the federal R&D investment, nearly all of which is
allocated through appropriations for discretionary spending, the budget resolution
sets a total amount for all discretionary appropriations; working from that total,
the Appropriations Committees spend the rest of the year dividing up that total
among the 12 annual appropriations bills, and further dividing those totals into
program-by-program funding levels for federal R&D and other discretionary
programs.
The
FY 2009 budget resolution allocates $1,013 billion for regular (non-emergency)
FY 2009 appropriations, $21 billion more than the President’s request. The budget
assumes the requested amount for defense discretionary programs, so the additional
$21 billion would go to shore up funding for nondefense programs. The additional
money would allow nondefense programs overall to increase slightly ahead of inflation,
instead of declining as in the President’s request. Considering that historically
federal R&D investments have been roughly 1 out of every 7 discretionary dollars,
the budget resolution could mean $3 billion or so more than the request for federal
R&D programs on the domestic side.
The
additional $21 billion could go a long way toward turning some requested cuts
into flat funding or increases. For the R&D investment, as reported in AAAS
Report XXXIII: R&D FY 2009, the comprehensive analysis of the FY 2009
R&D request, the budget request proposes large increases for three signature
Bush Administration priorities: research funding in the three physical sciences
agencies of the American Competitiveness Initiative (ACI; NSF, DOE Office of Science,
and the NIST laboratories), development funding in NASA for new human spacecraft,
and development funding for new weapons systems in DOD. But within the overall
declining nondefense budget, many other R&D programs would see their funding
remain flat or fall in FY 2009, including most agricultural and environmental
research programs, NIH biomedical research, and even non-priority funding within
priority agencies such as NASA’s research portfolio and NIST’s extramural programs.
The budget resolution’s $1.0 trillion total could allow appropriators to sustain
requested increases for ACI and other programs, but also boost funding for NIH
and other agencies.
Unfortunately,
this scenario is exactly the same scenario as last year’s 2008 process, when Congress
went into the 2008 appropriations season with $21 billion more than the President
and proceeded to write 2008 appropriations bills shoring up funding for domestic
programs proposed for steep cuts in the request while sustaining large R&D
increases in the ACI agencies. But after actual and threatened presidential vetoes
for appropriations bills that exceeded his request, Congress eventually gave up
the extra $21 billion and produced a December 2008 omnibus appropriations bill
that stuck to the President’s total and trimmed the ACI increases in order to
increase funding for other areas. President Bush has once again threatened to
veto any 2009 appropriations bills that exceed his request, so the conditions
are ripe for another appropriations stalemate in the fall, with the only change
a Congress already signaling its willingness to wait until a new President takes
office in January to finalize 2009 appropriations, in the hope that he or she
will be more willing to accept the additional $21 billion in domestic appropriations
than President Bush.
Budget
Functions: More for NSF, NASA, DOE, and NIH Possible
Although
the budget resolution does not contain program-by-program funding levels, it does
contain ‘budget function’ totals that serve as guides for appropriators and expressions
of congressional priorities. The budget divides the $1,013 billion total for all
2009 discretionary spending by budget functions, or national missions, giving
a preliminary indication of how Congress would like to allocate the additional
$21 billion it has given appropriators. Below is a short summary of selected budget
functions and the potential impacts of the new budget resolution (the parentheses
refer to function numbers).
Defense
(050) – The congressional allocation of $537.8 billion for defense (excluding
the nearly $70 billion for 2009 war costs in the supplemental) nearly matches
the President’s request, but Congress is likely to shift money around. Every year,
Congress has added billions of dollars to DOD R&D on top of the request, primarily
through the addition of performer-specific earmarks. One item of interest is whether
Congress will agree to DOD’s 4 percent requested increase in its “6.1” (basic
research) portfolio, a 16 percent increase if 2008 earmarks are excluded.
General
Science, Space and Technology (250) – This function covers NSF, DOE Office
of Science, and NASA funding. The budget assumes $30.5 billion in appropriations
for these programs, more than the $29.4 billion request and therefore more than
enough to provide the full ACI increases for NSF and the DOE Office of Science,
with room to give NASA $1 billion more than request to fund both NASA spacecraft
development and NASA’s support of research.
Health
(550) – This function covers discretionary health programs in HHS, more than
half of which goes to NIH. The $59.7 billion allocation is $7 billion more than
the request, which gives appropriators ample room to turn a flat NIH request into
an increase while adding funds to steep requested cuts in other health programs.
These
additional allocations depend, of course, on the President’s willingness to sign
appropriations bills containing these additional funds into law.
Next Steps and Possible Impacts
The
Appropriations Committees will begin drafting and approving appropriations bills
in coming weeks, but none, or at most one or two, of the 12 2009 appropriations
bills will be signed into law by the October 1 start of FY 2009. It is increasingly
likely that the 2009 appropriations process will drag on into calendar year 2009
and the next presidential administration. A continually updated table on the current
status of FY 2009 appropriations will be available on the AAAS R&D web site,
and AAAS R&D Funding Updates on House and Senate R&D appropriations for
the major R&D funding agencies will also be available at each stage of the
FY 2009 appropriations process.
This
analysis will be revised in June after final 2008 supplemental and 2009 budget
resolution action.
(More materials on R&D in the FY 2009 budget,
historical data and charts, and more information on AAAS Report XXXIII: Research and Development FY
2009, can be found on the AAAS R&D Web site at http://www.aaas.org/spp/rd.)
-
May 21, 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
