(This
analysis is a preview of the DHS chapter in the forthcoming AAAS Report XXXI:
Research and Development FY 2007, a comprehensive look at the President's
budget for R&D in FY 2007. 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
2007 budget can be found on the AAAS R&D Web site at http://www.aaas.org/spp/rd.)
Highlights
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After several years of rapid increases, the Department of Homeland Security’s
(DHS) R&D funding would fall for the first time in the 2007 budget, by 10.3
percent down to $1.1 billion (see Table II-6).
The total DHS budget would continue to increase by 6.6 percent to $35.4 billon
in 2007.
- The
radiological and nuclear countermeasures R&D portfolio moves to a new Domestic
Nuclear Detection Office (DNDO) in 2006, and would move again to a separate budget
account in 2007 from the rest of the DHS R&D portfolio. DNDO R&D would
continue to increase dramatically, from $209 million to $328 million.
-
Funding for nearly all DHS R&D activities would decline from previous years.
Only DHS R&D activities in interoperable communications, cybersecurity,
and radiological and nuclear countermeasures would increase.
-
Because of an emphasis on development over research, basic and applied research
in DHS could decline 20 percent in the 2007 budget plan.
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University and Fellowship Programs funding would drop further to $52 million in
2007, down $10 million.
DHS R&D in the FY 2007 Budget
Nearly five years after the fall 2001 terrorist attacks and more than three
years after the hurried creation of a new cabinet-level department to guard against
terrorist threats, the 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. The DHS budget continues to be a high
priority for the Bush Administration; the FY 2007 budget requests $35.4 billion
for the entire department’s appropriated activities, an increase of $2.2 billion
or 6.6 percent following a similar increase last year. But it is a different story
for the DHS R&D portfolio: after starting from virtually nothing three years
ago and rapidly ramping up its R&D capabilities to become the seventh-largest
R&D funding agency, DHS R&D would fall 10.3 percent to $1.1
billion in 2007 (see Table
II-6) in a broad-based retrenchment that would affect nearly all parts of
the DHS R&D portfolio. (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 2007. 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.)
Figure 1.
(click on the image for PDF)
In FY
2006, nearly all DHS R&D programs have their home in the Directorate
of Science and Technology (S&T). 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.
Congress keeps Coast Guard (CG) R&D separate within the Coast Guard appropriation
at $19 million in 2006; the FY 2007 request would keep it there at $15 million.
But Transportation Security Administration (TSA) R&D, which like the Coast
Guard transferred to DHS from the Department of Transportation (DOT) in 2003,
moves to the S&T Directorate in 2006 at a reduced funding level of roughly
$95 million, down by nearly half from $178 million (see Table II-6). But the consolidation
would reverse somewhat in FY 2007 as the radiological and nuclear countermeasures
portfolio would migrate out of S&T to a separate Domestic Nuclear Detection
Office (DNDO).
R&D
against weapons of mass destruction dominates the DHS R&D portfolio (see
Figure 1). 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 $337 million,
down 10.4 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. The FY 2006 appropriation contains
$23 million in new funds to start construction of a new National Bio and Agrodefense
Facility (NBAF), a $450 million total project which continues in 2007 with a scheduled
completion of 2010 to enhance DHS capabilities to respond to food or animal-borne
terrorist threats and to replace DHS’ existing facility on Plum
Island, New York.
Explosives
countermeasures funding appears to increase in 2007 (see Table II-6), but the
apparent increase is due to the transfer of civil aviation explosives detection
R&D from the Transportation Security Administration (TSA) in 2005 to an R&D
Consolidation account in 2006 to the Explosives Countermeasures account in 2007;
with each transition, funding would be reduced dramatically.
The
Domestic Nuclear Detection Office (DNDO), which funds the radiological and nuclear
countermeasures portfolio, begins operations in 2006 within the S&T Directorate,
but would move 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. DNDO will be staffed with a multi-agency
team and will coordinate its efforts with the intelligence community, and will
fund R&D, develop new technologies, and transition these technologies to field
use. The total DNDO budget of $334 million in 2006 would increase dramatically
to $536 million in 2007. Subtracting $178 million in procurement of nuclear detection
devices for U.S.
ports of entry and $30 million in management costs for the newly independent office
would leave $328 million for R&D, up dramatically from $209 million in 2006
and just $123 million the year before (see Figure 2). (The initial DNDO budget
for 2006 is $334 million within S&T, of which $125 million would go to procurement;
in 2005, these procurement costs were in other parts of the DHS budget.)
Figure 2.
(click on the image for PDF)
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 the 2007 request (see Figure 2). Funding for many
areas would decline for the second year in a row. Other than radiological and
nuclear countermeasures, only the interoperable communications (up $4 million
to $30 million) and cybersecurity portfolios (up $6
million to $23 million) would increase in 2007 (see Table
II-6). All other DHS R&D areas would see cuts in 2007; the apparent increases
in explosives countermeasures and R&D for DHS Agencies would be due to transfers
from the R&D Consolidation account. The Counter MANPADS portfolio would plummet
from $109 million down to $5 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. In 2007, field
testing of these prototypes on cargo aircraft would allow Congress and DHS to
choose how to proceed on further development or procurement.
Figure 3.
(click on the image for PDF)
Funding
for University and Fellowship Programs would fall $10 million to $52 million in
2007, 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, 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 request 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. The first
Cooperative Center, a joint DHS-EPA effort, was awarded to Michigan State University
and partners for microbial risk assessment. It will be joined in 2006 by a DHS-Lawrence
Livermore National Laboratory center on computational challenges for homeland
security, and both will continue to funded in 2007. 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 the FY 2007 request.
DHS
has recently reclassified its R&D portfolio, from primarily development to
primarily research. DHS support of basic and applied research would total $903
million in FY 2007, more than three-quarters of the R&D portfolio, compared
to less than half in previous reports. But the DHS request would favor development
activities (primarily in DNDO’s work) over research,
resulting in a 20 percent cut to the DHS research portfolio.
Next Steps and Likely Impacts
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 3, 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 3), 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.
But
after DHS finished its start-up phase in 2005, budget growth slowed down in 2006
and would reverse in 2007 (see Figure 3). After several years in which every part
of the DHS R&D portfolio grew dramatically, in 2006 and 2007 there would be
difficult rebalancing choices made within the portfolio, as DHS shifts resources
out of some technologies and into others. While this could be a sign that DHS
is now a mature R&D funding agency, it could also be a sign that homeland
security is now one of many priorities in the government that compete for scarce
resources, after many years in which it was a paramount national priority.
(More
materials on R&D in the FY 2007 budget, historical data and charts, and more
information on AAAS Report XXXI: Research and Development FY 2007, can
be found on the AAAS R&D Web site at http://www.aaas.org/spp/rd.)
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February 28, 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
