As part of a rush to draft
all 13 FY 2003 appropriations bills before a month-long August recess,
the Senate Appropriations Committee on July 18 approved its version
of an FY 2003 Commerce-Justice appropriations bill (S. 2778) that would
boost funding for the Department of Commerce’s R&D programs.
The bill would provide $1.2 billion for Commerce R&D, an increase
of 6.9 percent or $78 million over FY 2002 (see Table).
This would be a contrast to the President’s request, which would have
reduced Commerce R&D below $1.1 billion. Both of Commerce’s two
major R&D agencies—the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration
(NOAA) and the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST)—would
receive increases from the Senate. NOAA R&D would rise by 11.6 percent
or $71 million above FY 2002 and the National Sea Grant program would
remain within NOAA, while NIST R&D would edge up 2.2 percent to
$498 million. The Senate would go against the Bush Administration’s
proposals to halve NIST’s Advanced Technology
Program and eliminate federal support for the Manufacturing Extension
Partnership (MEP).
The Senate Commerce-Justice
bill is able to be generous to R&D programs because of its large
total allocation. The $43.5 billion of discretionary spending in the
bill would be nearly $3 billion more than the FY 2002 funding level,
and would be nearly the same amount above the President’s request. (For
details of Commerce R&D in the President’s request, please see Chapter
12 of AAAS Report XXVII: R&D FY 2003). The
bill, in addition to Commerce programs, funds the Department of Justice,
the Department of State, and miscellaneous international programs. The
House has not yet drafted its version of the bill.
NOAA R&D programs are
a high priority for the Senate, as they have been in past years. NOAA
plays a key role in research on the topics of climate change, weather,
and fisheries. The Senate bill would provide substantial
increases for many NOAA R&D accounts, especially in the National
Ocean Service (NOS) and Oceanic and Atmospheric Research (OAR) for a
total NOAA R&D portfolio of $682 million, an 11.6 percent increase
over FY 2002 in sharp contrast to a requested cut. The total NOAA budget
would be $3.3 billion (up 2.7 percent).
The primary reason for the
requested cut was the Administration’s proposal to transfer the National Sea Grant College Program to
the National Science Foundation (NSF), resulting in a $62.4 million
loss. Begun in 1966, Sea Grant involves more than 200 universities in
its goal of gaining a better understanding of marine life and marine
resources through education, outreach, and technology transfer. Sea
Grant provides grants to these universities. The budget proposed that
NSF should acquire this program because of its proven track record in
managing competitive grants, but the Senate would reject the transfer and keep
Sea Grant in NOAA at $63 million in FY 2003. The Senate bill criticizes
the Administration proposal for eliminating the program’s state matching
requirement and for potentially altering its applied research agenda
oriented to NOAA needs toward a more basic research orientation. In
addition to keeping Sea Grant within OAR, the Senate would boost other
OAR research for a total OAR R&D budget of $350 million, an increase
of 20.8 percent spread across OAR’s research agenda, except that the Senate would not fund
the Administration’s $18 million request to start up its Climate Change
Research Initiative (CCRI). The CCRI calls for NOAA to initiate programs
in climate modeling, climate and ocean observation systems, carbon monitoring,
and aerosol-climate interactions to address gaps in current climate
change knowledge. The Senate criticizes the proposed program as “an
ill-defined program.” Instead, the Senate would boost funding for existing
NOAA climate change research programs under the long-standing U.S. Global
Change Research Program framework to $159 million.
The Senate would maintain
stable funding for NIST’s Advanced Technology Program (ATP) with a slight boost of 0.5 percent in
its R&D to $159 million. The Bush Administration would have
cut ATP R&D in half to $81 million. Started by the first Bush Administration
but promoted as a key technology initiative by the Clinton Administration,
the ATP is an extramural research grants program to provide precompetitive
cost-shared R&D support for promising market technologies. The House
has repeatedly voted to terminate the program, and the current Bush
Administration has not been a strong supporter, but the Senate has managed
to preserve it in past budget struggles. Many Republicans regard the
ATP as “corporate welfare,” a subsidy to industrial firms that unnecessarily
funds research private firms could and should support. The request would
not have allowed for any new awards in FY 2003, only continuations of
existing grants, but the Senate appropriation calls for $61 million
in new grants.
Total NIST R&D would
increase by 2.2 percent in the Senate bill to $498 million rather than
the requested cut to $467 million. The main NIST R&D activity—Scientific and Technical Research and Services (STRS), which funds intramural
research at the NIST laboratories—would rise slightly by 3.2 percent
(or $8 million) to $276 million. The Administration request would
have shifted funds from ATP to STRS and would have allowed for a substantial
24 percent increase in STRS R&D to $332 million. The other NIST
R&D program, Construction of Research Facilities, would increase
$1 million over FY 2002 to $64 million but $28 million of the Senate
appropriation would go to five earmarked research projects instead of
NIST facilities construction. The FY 2002 appropriation of $62 million
includes $42 million in such earmarks. The non-R&D Manufacturing
Extension Partnership (MEP), a program to operate a nationwide network
of extension centers to disseminate better manufacturing technologies
to small- and medium-sized manufacturers, would receive $107 million,
the same amount as FY 2002, in a rebuff to the Administration’s request
to terminate federal funding for these centers in FY 2003.
The Commerce-Justice bill
now heads to the Senate floor, where it is expected to win approval
before the August recess. The House will not draft its version of the
bill until September; its funding levels for Commerce R&D are expected
to be substantially lower than the Senate bill, partially because it
will be working with a total allocation level more than $3 billion lower
than the Senate and partially because the Republican-controlled House’s
priorities are more in line with the Bush Administration than the Democratic-controlled
Senate.
- July 26, 2002
AAAS R&D Budget and Policy Program
American Association for the Advancement of Science
1200 New York Ave, NW
Washington, DC 20005
(202) 326-6607
science_policy@aaas.org
http://www.aaas.org/spp/rd
(new URL)
