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Dept. of Homeland Security R&D in FY 2007 Conference Appropriations PDF
version of this document Main
R&D in the FY 2007 Budget Page
Supplemental
Materials: "Senate Cuts DHS
R&D," AAAS R&D Funding Update on DHS R&D in FY 2007 Senate
Appropriations "DHS R&D
Falls Steeply In House Plan," AAAS R&D Funding Update on DHS R&D
in FY 2007 House Appropriations "DHS
R&D Falls in 2007 Budget," AAAS R&D Funding Update on R&D
in the FY 2007 DHS Budget AAAS Analysis
of R&D in the FY 2007 Budget -
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Congress recently finalized an FY 2007 Homeland Security appropriations bill that
would cut the Department of Homeland Security’s (DHS) R&D funding for the
first time in 2007. DHS R&D would fall 22 percent to $1.0 billion even
as the total DHS budget would keep increasing. Funding for most DHS R&D
activities would decline. Only DHS R&D activities in cybersecurity,
interoperable communications, and radiological and nuclear countermeasures would
receive increases in 2007. -
The radiological and nuclear countermeasures R&D portfolio would receive a
significant increase as part of its move from the Science and Technology directorate
to a separate Domestic Nuclear Detection Office (DNDO) in 2007. Congress boosts
DNDO R&D from $209 million within S&T to $273 million, a boost of 31 percent.
- Congressional
dissatisfaction over DHS management continues to grow. The final DHS budget withholds
$65 million in 2007 R&D funds (and an additional $60 million in management
funds) until DHS provides Congress with detailed reports on financial management
and performance measures. The bill also rescinds $125 million in previously appropriated
R&D funds that DHS has not spent yet.  Figure
1. (click on the image for PDF) -
University and Fellowship Programs funding would drop $12 million to $50 million
in 2007. The final DHS bill leaves out a Senate provision limiting DHS university
centers to three years of federal support. DHS R&D in FY 2007 House-Senate Conference Appropriations On
September 29, the House and Senate gave final approval to the conference report
(final version) of the FY 2007 Homeland Security appropriations bill (HR 5441),
which funds the Department of Homeland Security (DHS). President Bush is expected
to the sign the bill into law shortly. The
DHS budget continues to be a high priority for the Bush Administration and for
Congress, but it is a different story for the DHS R&D portfolio: after starting
from virtually nothing three years ago and rapidly ramping up to become the seventh-largest
agency R&D portfolio, DHS R&D in FY 2007 would fall for the
first time, by 21.7 percent or $278 million to $1.0 billion (see Table and Figure
1). Funding for nearly every part of DHS’ broad portfolio of R&D activities
would fall. (For details of the President’s request for DHS R&D, please
see Chapter 12 of AAAS Report XXXI: R&D
FY 2007 or the February 28 DHS
R&D Funding Update. For details of Senate appropriations, see the July
6 Update; for House appropriations, see the May 31 Update.) After
a 2006 budget in which there were ups and downs for the first time in the R&D
portfolio after nothing but ups in the first few years, the cuts would far
outnumber the increases in 2007 (see Table and Figure
3). Other than a large increase for radiological / nuclear countermeasures,
only the cybersecurity (up $3 million to $20 million)
and interoperable communications portfolios (up $1 million to $27 million) would
increase in 2007 (see Table). All other DHS R&D areas would see cuts in 2007;
the apparent increase in R&D for DHS Agencies would be due to transfers from
the R&D Consolidation account, and the apparent increase in explosives R&D
is due to the transfer of TSA R&D into the account in 2007. The Counter MANPADS
portfolio would plummet from $109 million down to $40 million, primarily because
the development phase of this project would end in 2006 with the production of
prototypes. Man Portable Air Defense Systems (MANPADS) are shoulder-mounted portable
air missiles that have been used (unsuccessfully so far) against passenger aircraft.
 Figure
2. (click on the image for PDF) Within
the diminishing total, R&D against weapons of mass destruction dominates the
DHS R&D portfolio (see Figure 2). Defenses against biological, chemical,
explosive, radiological, and nuclear threats continue to make up nearly three-quarters
of the R&D investment, but of these areas only the radiological and nuclear
R&D portfolio would increase in 2007. Biological
countermeasures would continue to be the largest portfolio with $350 million,
down 7 percent from 2006. DHS’ biodefense effort works
with the Department of Defense (DOD), the National Institutes of Health (NIH),
the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) and other agencies. Construction of
the National Biodefense Analysis and Countermeasures
Center (NBACC) continues in FY 2006 and 2007 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; groundbreaking on the facility took
place over the summer. Congress would also reduce the Chemical Countermeasures
R&D portfolio to $60 million, 36 percent below last year, despite increasing
congressional concern over the vulnerability of chemical plants or transported
chemicals to terrorist attacks.  Figure
3. (click on the image for PDF) Funding
for University and Fellowship Programs would fall $12 million to $50 million in
2007, after a similar cut in 2006. But Congress has noted that this program has
not yet obligated as much as $68 million in previously appropriated funds, so
that the cut should have less impact than at first glance. This program funds
university-based Centers of Excellence that are multi-year university consortia
to perform R&D on homeland security-related topics, Cooperative Centers that
are multi-agency university centers, 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 five DHS Centers of Excellence, the latest
awarded in December 2005 to Johns Hopkins
University and partners for the National
Center for the Study of Preparedness
and Catastrophic Event Response. The FY 2007 appropriation would continue funding
for these centers and would leave open the possibility of a sixth center. But
the declining budget would not allow for any more university centers, stopping
short of the up to 10 centers envisioned three years ago when DHS was founded.
On the fellowships side, DHS would support 200 students and scholars (down significantly
from 300 this year), and also up to ten postdoctoral fellows and up to five AAAS
fellows to participate in DHS research with the resources provided in FY 2007.
The final DHS
appropriation does not contain language from the Senate version of the bill limiting
DHS centers to three years of federal support. In
2006, nearly all DHS R&D programs had their home in the Directorate
of Science and Technology (S&T) after several years of consolidation, but
Congress and DHS are now undoing this consolidation because of disenchantment
with the directorate’s performance so far. The S&T 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.
In 2006, only Coast Guard (CG) R&D remained separate within the Coast Guard
appropriation at $19 million. But in 2007, the consolidation would reverse as
the radiological and nuclear countermeasures portfolio migrates out of S&T
to a separate Domestic Nuclear Detection Office (DNDO). The Senate would have
gone further by also moving most of the explosives countermeasures portfolio out
of S&T back to where it came from, the Transportation Security Administration
(TSA), but the final bill keeps this portfolio within S&T. The
Domestic Nuclear Detection Office (DNDO), which funds the radiological and nuclear
countermeasures portfolio, begins operations in 2006 within the S&T Directorate,
but moves to a separate budget account in 2007. The DNDO will develop, acquire,
and support a domestic system to detect and report terrorist attempts to transport
or use radiological or nuclear materials. The total DNDO budget of $334 million
in 2006 would increase dramatically to $481 million in 2007. Subtracting procurement
and management funding leaves $273 million for DNDO R&D, up from $209 million
in 2006 for comparable programs and just $123 million the year before. Included
in the 2007 increase is a new $9 million DNDO university research program. Both
the House and the Senate have expressed their concerns about the effectiveness
of this new organization and criticized DHS for not providing enough information
about how the Office will effectively perform its missions, in particular how
DNDO will coordinate with the many other government agencies both inside and outside
DHS that will ultimately implement radiological and nuclear detection systems
at U.S. ports of entry and other locations. The final Homeland Security bill withholds
$15 million in R&D funds until DNDO signs memoranda of understanding with
all other federal agencies involved in radiological and nuclear materials outlining
clearly each agency’s roles and responsibilities with respect to DNDO. Congress
leaves just $713 million in R&D for the S&T Directorate to manage in 2007,
little more than half the $1.3 billion the directorate had in 2006. In earlier
versions of the bill, Congress had 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 has been given. The final
bill rescinds $125 million previously appropriated R&D funds that have never
been obligated, and requires S&T to submit a five-year research plan with
priorities, performance measures, and resource needs for each R&D area before
it can spend a $60 million chunk of its 2007 R&D funds. Congress separately
withholds $60 million in S&T management costs funding until a detailed accounting
of overhead and management costs for the R&D portfolio is delivered. DHS
R&D gets its first earmark in 2007 with an unrequested
$2 million appropriation for radiological laboratories at the Pacific Northwest
National Laboratory in Washington.
The DHS R&D portfolio had been earmark-free since the department’s founding.
Outlook
and Next Steps President
Bush is expected to sign the Homeland Security bill into law shortly. DHS becomes
only the second R&D funding agency (after the Department
of Defense) to receive its final FY 2007 appropriation. DHS
R&D, after a rapid ramp-up phase, now appears to be a mature R&D portfolio
and subject like other R&D funding agencies to cuts because of the tight budget
situation facing domestic programs. As shown in Figure 1, 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 1), 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. But after DHS finished its start-up phase in 2005, budget growth
slowed down in 2006 and reverses in 2007 (see Figure 1) amid growing concern that
the budget has grown far faster than the department’s ability to spend its money
wisely. Now, only the radiological and nuclear countermeasures portfolio remains
a growth area (see Figure 3). (This analysis is one of a series
of AAAS R&D Funding Updates on FY 2007 congressional appropriations. The complete
series of AAAS R&D Funding Updates, including continually updated analyses
of R&D in FY 2007 appropriations, is available on the AAAS
R&D Web Site (http://www.aaas.org/spp/rd)
in the “FY 2007 R&D” or the “What’s
New” sections.)-
October 2, 2006
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
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