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Go to: -Table.
Dept. of Homeland Security R&D in FY 2008 Final Appropriations PDF
version of this document Main
R&D in the FY 2008 Budget Page
Supplemental
Materials: "DHS R&D Climbs
11 Percent in Senate Plan," AAAS R&D Funding Update on R&D in
FY 2008 DHS Senate Appropriations "House
Proposes Slight Increase in DHS R&D ," AAAS R&D Funding Update
on R&D in FY 2008 DHS House Appropriations "DHS
R&D Holds in 2008 After Steep Cuts in 2007," AAAS R&D Funding
Update on R&D in the FY 2008 DHS Budget AAAS
Analysis of R&D in the FY 2008 Budget -
| Highlights -
After a sharp drop last year, Congress returns to giving the Department of
Homeland Security’s (DHS) R&D portfolio a large increase in 2008. The final
2008 DHS R&D total of $1.0 billion is $86 million or 9.0 percent more than
in 2007 (see Table), primarily because of new R&D
earmarks. -
DHS’ University Programs receive $49 million, the same as last year and $11 million
more than the request. DHS plans to support
11 university-based centers by 2008. -
Research on radiological and nuclear countermeasures would continue to increase,
by 5.2 percent to $324 million for the newly created Domestic Nuclear Detection
Office (DNDO), but within the main Science and Technology Directorate chemical
and biological countermeasures R&D would fall 9.3 percent to $208 million.
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Congress slashed the request for the Innovation program to develop revolutionary
technological breakthroughs from $38 million last year to $33 million in 2008.
DHS R&D in FY 2008 Final Appropriations On
December 26, President Bush signed into law the FY 2008 omnibus appropriations
bill (HR 2764) that had cleared Congress a week earlier, bringing the 2008 appropriations
process to a close. The omnibus bill included a final version of the FY 2008 Homeland
Security appropriations bill. Although the President’s tight limits on domestic
spending frustrated congressional appropriators in most of the budget, Congress
managed to designate a large part of homeland security as ‘emergency’ and thus
exempt from the limits, allowing room for substantial increases in the DHS budget
for 2008, including in the department’s R&D portfolio. DHS
R&D totals $1.0 billion in the 2008 omnibus bill (see Table),
9.0 percent or $86 million more than 2007, primarily because of $82 million in
R&D earmarks. But 2008 DHS R&D would still be a steep drop from the $1.3 billion DHS had in 2006.
After starting from virtually nothing four years
ago and rapidly becoming the seventh-largest R&D funding agency, the DHS 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 head of
the DHS S&T Directorate for the past 18 months, the entire DHS R&D operation
is still reorganizing. Cohen proposed an extensive restructuring of the DHS R&D
portfolio in the 2008 budget request, consolidating many program lines and reshuffling
others to create new program portfolios. Congress has mostly agreed with Cohen’s
proposal and would fund DHS R&D in 2008 under his proposed structure, as shown
in the Table. Radiological and nuclear
countermeasures R&D in the new Domestic Nuclear Detection Office (DNDO) continues
to be the largest part of the DHS R&D portfolio in 2008 (see Figure 1).
DNDO was carved out of the S&T Directorate in 2006 and is now a stand-alone
entity devoted to radiological and nuclear countermeasures. Its mainly applied
research portfolio would climb 5.2 percent to $324 million in 2008 within a total
budget of $485 million. (The difference between the two totals is procurement
of nuclear detection devices for U.S. ports of entry, and management costs.) The
2008 increase would have been even larger, except that in May DNDO received an
extra $35 million for R&D (and $100 million for non-R&D procurement) for
2007 as part of the war supplemental bill. Congress
goes along with DNDO’s plan for large increases in transformational R&D (to
$96 million) to develop breakthrough methods of detecting radiological and nuclear
threats in operational settings, and in systems development ($118 million) of
new Advanced Spectroscopic Portal (APS) systems. 
Figure
1. (click on the image for PDF)
The chemical and biological
countermeasures portfolio would receive $208 million in the omnibus, $21 million
less than both 2007 and the 2008 request (see Figure 1). Although this portfolio
has been larger in previous years, in 2007 DHS spun off non-R&D programs such
as the BioWatch surveillance system to other DHS units, leaving behind only purely
R&D programs such as development of next-generation BioWatch 3 systems to
better identify bioterror attacks. Separately, in the Laboratory Facilities appropriation
($104 million, down 1.7 percent), 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. There would also be $11 million in funding for preliminary
work on the National Bio and Agrodefense Facility, working toward the beginning
of construction in 2010 after a site selection later this year, and a $15 million
earmarked appropriation for a Physical Science Facility at the Pacific Northwest
National Laboratory in eastern Washington. There would be other earmarks in the
final appropriation as well, most of them first introduced by the Senate, including
$27 million for a South East Region Research Initiative centered around Oak Ridge
National Laboratory (Tennessee) and $9.5 million for the multi-state Regional
Technology Initiative. In all, Congress would allocate $82 million for earmarks
in the DHS R&D portfolio in 2008 after refraining from earmarking during the
first several years of DHS’ existence. Congress keeps funding
for University Programs at $49 million in 2008. 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) will be awarded soon.
The
Innovation portfolio, a Cohen initiative to develop breakthrough technologies
and highly innovative approaches to homeland security problems, would have expanded
to $60 million in the DHS request, but Congress cuts funding down to $33 million.
Among the technologies this new program will tackle are tunnel detection devices,
improvised explosive devices, and critical infrastructure resiliency. 2008
DHS R&D Appropriations in Historical Context 
Figure
2. (click on the image for PDF) DHS
R&D, after a rapid ramp-up phase, grew too rapidly and is now in retrenchment
and reorganization. As shown in Figure 2, 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 creating new R&D capabilities after its foundation in FY 2003 (see
Figure 2), adding portfolios on long-neglected technology areas, establishing
relationships with existing national laboratories and federal laboratories, and
setting up new structures for funding external R&D. But
the S&T directorate struggled to ramp up its capabilities, staffing, and spending,
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. At the end of 2006, the S&T Directorate
had an unusually large $400 million in the bank from previous appropriations that
it had been unable to spend, and up to one-third of its staff positions were vacant.
The final 2007 appropriations bill rescinded $125 million in these unspent R&D
funds, 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. 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 2008
budget marks the new leadership’s first budget proposal. Although the 2007 and
2008 R&D totals are well below appropriations of previous years, DHS is still
working through its backlog of unspent funds; at the end of FY 2007, even after
rescissions and budget cuts, the S&T Directorate still had more than $100
million in unspent funds to carry over to FY 2008. So while DHS’ appropriations
history in Figure 2 is uneven, the actual outflow of money will be smoother as
appropriations get stretched out into outlays over several years. But
now, it may be the new DNDO that runs into problems in ramping up its operations.
In the omnibus bill, appropriators express concern that DNDO has been unable to
hire staff quickly enough to keep up with the rapid growth in its budget, and
criticize DNDO for providing too little detail on how it plans to spend its appropriations.
These concerns, if left unaddressed, could be signs of trouble for the 2009 appropriations
season. Impacts
of the DHS R&D Portfolio 
Figure
3. (click on the image for PDF) Recently,
DHS released its first data set on how it spent its initial R&D budgets. As
shown in Figure 3, 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. 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 4). 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. 
Figure
4. (click on the image for PDF)
Next
Steps and Outlook The
2008 DHS budget is now law. It remains to be seen whether the 2008 appropriation
is a sign of renewed congressional confidence in the DHS R&D portfolio, or
whether management troubles or missed technical deadlines will cause appropriators
to look more critically at DHS R&D in the upcoming 2009 appropriations season.
The President’s FY 2009 budget request arrives in early February.
Note: The AAAS estimates of DHS R&D in the
Table 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. The data in the
Table also differ from data in the April report AAAS Report XXXII: R&D
FY 2008 because of recent transfers out of the S&T directorate and because
of 2007 supplemental appropriations enacted in May in Public Law 110-28. -
January 3, 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
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