Highlights
- Congress has agreed to provide $8.7 billion for R&D in the Department
of Energy in FY 2004, an increase of $506 million or 6.1 percent (see
Table).
- DOE’s Office of Science has an R&D budget of $3.2 billion in FY 2004, a
boost of 3.8 percent or $116 million in contrast to a requested cut.
Congress added funds for high-performance computing research, domestic
fusion research, and for 90 congressionally designated projects.
-
Congress trimmed slightly the request for DOE’s
defense R&D activities, but still provided a $257 million or 6.7
percent increase for a total of $4.1 billion, including research funds
for a new generation of ‘bunker buster’ nuclear weapons.
The Department
of Energy (DOE) already has its final FY 2004 budget, but an omnibus
bill before Congress now could still make changes in its budget. On
December 1, President Bush signed into law the
FY 2004 Energy/Water appropriations bill (HR 2754), which provides funding
for the majority of Department of Energy (DOE) programs; on November
10, President Bush signed into law the final FY 2004 Interior appropriations
bill (HR 2691), which funds the remainder of DOE. But the FY 2004 omnibus
bill, which would fund most of the other government agencies, would
impose an across-the-board cut of 0.59 percent for all programs in both
bills. Together, the two bills provide $8.7 billion for DOE’s
R&D programs in FY 2004, $506 million or 6.1 percent more than FY
2003 (see Table; all figures have been
adjusted to reflect the across-the-board cut in the omnibus bill). Although
DOE’s energy and defense-related R&D activities
receive substantial increases in the final budget plan, DOE’s
Office of Science will have only a modest increase. (For details of
R&D in the FY 2004 request, please see Chapter
9 of AAAS
Report XXVIII: R&D FY 2004.)
DOE’s
R&D portfolio receives a greater percentage increase than the DOE
budget as a whole. The total FY
2004 DOE budget is $23.2 billion in final FY 2004 bills, an increase
of nearly $1 billion above FY 2003 and slightly below the Administration
request (see Table). More than two-thirds
of the DOE budget goes to defense-related activities involving the U.S.
nuclear weapons stockpile and related environmental clean-up costs,
including defense-related R&D to support these activities.
R&D
in DOE’s Science
program is a modest winner in the final Energy bill, though much of
the increase goes to congressional earmarks. Although the Administration
proposed flat funding at $3.1 billion for the third year in a row, Congress
has added $124 million to the request for a total of $3.2 billion in
FY 2004, a 3.8 percent boost compared to last year. The funding boost
should allow Science’s major research programs to increase operating
time and user support at scientific user facilities. The Office of Science
operates unique, large-scale research facilities at DOE’s
national laboratories around the country, which external researchers
can use for their own experiments through a competitive proposal process.
In recent years, tight budgets have squeezed operating time at these
facilities. Funding for the largest OS account, Basic Energy Sciences,
declines $13 million to $1.0 billion, but only because construction
costs of the Spallation Neutron Source, a
new large-scale facility in Tennessee,
will decline in FY 2004. BES support of research grants and facilities
user time will actually increase in FY 2004, especially in the area
of nanoscale science.
Congress also provides additional funds to the Fusion Energy Sciences
program to ensure that U.S. participation in an international fusion project will not crowd out domestic
research. The Fusion appropriation of $263 million is $14 million
more than last year and $5 million more than the request. In January,
DOE announced that the U.S.
would rejoin the International Thermonuclear Experimental Reactor (ITER)
project after leaving the $5 billion international project in 1998,
and proposed $12 million as the U.S.
contribution to the project. In the request the new ITER funding would
have necessitated a small reduction in U.S.-based fusion research, but
Congress approved $8 million for ITER participation and added $7 million
to the request for domestic fusion research to keep domestic fusion
funding level.
The largest Office of Science increase goes to Advanced Scientific Computing
Research (ASCR), whose funding jumps 19.1
percent to $204 million in contrast to a flat request. Much of the new
funding will support the acquisition of additional advanced computing
capabilities and additional R&D on next-generation computing and
its applications, but $2 million of ASCR funding would come from the
FY 2004 omnibus bill for an earmarked nanotechnology and computing research
center.
The Biological and Environmental Research (BER) account is home to 95 congressionally
designated, performer-specific R&D earmarks totaling $93 million
in FY 2004, including some projects contained in the FY 2004 omnibus
bill. The BER appropriation is $590 million for FY 2004, $90 million
more than the request and $63 million or 12.0 percent more than FY 2003.
Last year’s BER budget contained $50 million in R&D earmarks while
the request deleted all of them, so nearly half the increase over FY
2003 and all of the increase above the request goes to fund the FY 2004
crop of R&D earmarks.
Figure 1. (click
on the image to view or download a full-page color PDF version of the
chart)
After more than a decade of steep cuts and stagnant budgets, the DOE Office
of Science has less money now for its R&D programs than it did in
the early 1990s (see Figure 1). In
today’s dollars, the Science program has been stuck at roughly $3 billion
since FY 2001, and even the FY 2004 increase enables the Office to just
barely stay ahead of inflation.
On the energy side, the increases are larger. The final DOE budget boosts
funding for R&D on hydrogen and nuclear energy, but cuts spending
in other renewable energy areas. In February, the Bush Administration
proposed a major expansion of hydrogen-related R&D as a long-term
step toward using hydrogen fuel cells to power automobiles. Within the
Energy Supply account, the Bush Administration proposed to boost hydrogen
research from $40 million to $88 million, offset by cuts in other energy
programs. Congress trims the request down to $78 million, almost double
the FY 2003 level, but left in place proposed cuts to biomass, geothermal,
solar, and wind energy research. The overall Solar and Renewables
R&D program increases 5.8 percent to $254 million, thanks in part
to additional appropriations contained in the FY 2004 omnibus bill.
Nuclear energy R&D receives a substantial boost of 90.3 percent
to $132 million, mostly on R&D to keep the existing generation of
nuclear power plants operating safely, with some efforts to develop
a next generation of nuclear plants.
In other energy programs, there are generous increases. While the
Bush Administration requested a sharp 15 percent cut in Fossil Energy R&D, Congress added back the funds and provided
$514 million, a remarkable 6.5 percent increase over FY 2003. Congress added funds to the Administration’s
$130 million request for its Clean Coal Power Initiative to develop
and demonstrate new coal-fired electricity generation technologies,
for a new total of $172 million. Congress also voted to reverse the
Administration’s proposed cuts to R&D related to other fossil fuels
such as petroleum, natural gas, and other fuels. Congress was able to
be so generous with these programs by rescinding unspent funds in the
Clean Coal Technology program, a predecessor to the Clean Coal Power
Initiative. Congress also approved a large increase in Energy Conservation R&D by 6.8 percent
over FY 2004 to $456 million in FY 2004, $14 million above the request.
Among activities that receive additions to the request are building
technologies, distributed energy resources, industrial technologies,
and vehicle technology R&D. Congress trimmed the $78 million request
for fuel cell technologies R&D, part of the Administration’s hydrogen
fuel cell initiative, down to $66 million, but this still represents
a large increase over FY 2003 funding levels. Congress found money for
these increases by trimming funding for non-R&D grants programs
in weatherization assistance also funded through Energy Conservation.
On the defense
side, most of DOE’s R&D is funded by the National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA), which was created
in 2000 as a semi-autonomous agency within DOE. NNSA funds maintenance
of the nation’s nuclear weapons stockpile through science-based research,
mostly in its core Weapons Activities account. R&D in Weapons Activities
has grown substantially in recent years in lockstep with rapid growth
in overall defense spending, from $2.4 billion in FY 2001 to $2.9 billion
last year, and grows again to $3.2 billion in FY 2004 for an 8.9 percent
increase. Within the overall portfolio, there is a slight 2.4 percent
increase in funding for Advanced Simulation and Computing, an effort to develop the next generation
of computer processing technologies to better model nuclear explosions,
to $721 million. Inertial Confinement Fusion R&D funding rises 2.0
percent to $514 million, including $149 million for continued construction
of the National Ignition Facility in California.
This year, there
was considerable controversy over the Bush
Administration’s proposal to initiate research on a new generation of
nuclear weapons, including the Robust Earth Penetrator
(RNEP) project (nicknamed a ‘bunker buster’ bomb) and other tactical
or ‘low-yield’ nuclear weapons. After much congressional wrangling over
relatively modest investments, the final Energy/Water bill provides
$7.5 million in Weapons Activities for early research on RNEP and $6
million for research on other new nuclear weapons concepts, but stipulates
that no funds may be used for development or testing. The bill also
withholds $4 million in funding until DOE submits a detailed plan on
the U.S.
nuclear weapons stockpile to Congress. In parallel, President Bush signed
into law in November the FY 2004 defense authorization bill (HR 1588)
which repeals the longstanding U.S. prohibition on research and development
of low-yield nuclear weapons, thus allowing this research program to
take place, but prohibits DOE from entering the development phase of
the RNEP or other tactical nuclear weapons unless it receives explicit
authorization from a future Congress.
The Energy-Water bill contains a
provision that could affect the managers of five of DOE’s
national laboratories. The provision requires DOE to competitively award
management contracts for five national laboratories as the current contracts
expire over the next few years. The affected labs are the Ames Laboratory in
Iowa operated by the University of Iowa; Argonne National Laboratory in
Illinois operated by the University of Chicago; and Lawrence Berkeley National
Laboratory, Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California; and Los
Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico. The latter three are operated by the University
of California. These five
laboratories are all government owned but have been operated for over 50 years
by the current managers under a series of renewed contracts.
Likely Impacts of the DOE FY 2004 Budget
DOE’s
FY 2004 budget should allow for a modest expansion of the department’s
research efforts. As Figure 2 suggests, roughly two-thirds of DOE’s
R&D portfolio goes to basic and applied research, with the remainder
going to development and R&D facilities. A third of this research
portfolio goes to support of the physical sciences, another third to
engineering research, and the remainder to the computer sciences, mathematics,
and other disciplines.
Figure 2. (click
on the image to view or download a full-page color PDF version of the
chart)
This DOE support for the physical
sciences is crucial to the health of the U.S.
physical sciences enterprise. DOE support is the largest single federal agency
sponsor for the physical sciences, as shown in Figure 3. DOE funds more than 40
percent of all federal support for the physical sciences, and in physics
research it is responsible for nearly two-thirds of all federal support. In
addition to the overwhelming DOE role in research funding, DOE also funds
construction and maintenance of large physics facilities at its national
laboratories such as Argonne National Laboratory and in Europe
such as the Large Hadron Collider
which are used by physicists and other researchers for their experiments.
Figure 3. (click
on the image to view or download a full-page color PDF version of the
chart)
Because of recent stagnation in
the Office of Science budget (see Figure 1), DOE support for physical sciences
research in particular has declined in recent years, peaking in FY 1994 and
declining by nearly 20 percent since then from $2.5 billion a year to roughly
$2.0 billion in FY 2003. While the
modest FY 2004 increase will not reverse these cuts, the FY 2004 DOE budget
should at least allow the department to keep its support for physical sciences
research level with last year. Similarly, DOE support of the environmental
sciences and life sciences, primarily in the OS BER program, has also declined
since the 1990s.
In recent years,
the growth areas for DOE’s research portfolio
have been in the computer sciences and engineering, which now collectively
make up half the DOE research portfolio. This recent growth reflects
funding increases in DOE defense programs supporting the nuclear stockpile
stewardship mission such as Advanced Simulation and Computing and Inertial
Confinement Fusion, along with more modest increases in their ASCR and
Fusion Energy Sciences non-defense counterparts. The FY 2004 budget
promises increases in these programs, which should translate into modest
increases in engineering and a large increase in computer sciences support
from DOE.
Figure 4. (click
on the image to view or download a full-page color PDF version of the
chart)
As for performers, Figure 4 shows
that nearly two-thirds of the DOE R&D budget goes to its network of
national laboratories, which are government owned but operated by contractors.
These are split between the three primarily defense laboratories (Los Alamos, Sandia, and Lawrence Livermore) which receive the bulk of
their funding from the Weapons Activities account, and the multi-program
civilian laboratories (such as Argonne, Brookhaven, and Oak Ridge) which
receive a mix of Office of Science, energy, and defense funding. Universities
and colleges receive less than 10 percent of the DOE R&D portfolio, but
university researchers benefit from being able to use
the scientific user facilities located at the national laboratories for their
experiments. Another tenth of the DOE R&D portfolio is performed at DOE
federal laboratories, which are similar to the national laboratories except
that they are fully owned and operated by the federal government. Finally, 16
percent of the DOE R&D portfolio funds work in private industry, primarily
in the energy R&D programs but also in the defense programs.
Next Steps
President Bush
signed the Energy-Water bill into law on December 1, and the Interior
bill into law on November 10. DOE is only the fourth of the major R&D
funding agencies (after the Departments of Homeland Security, Defense,
and Interior) to receive a final FY 2004 budget. The FY 2004 omnibus
bill would impose a 0.59 percent across-the-board cut on DOE and other
agencies. If the omnibus bill is signed into law as
is in late January, then DOE will impose the reduction on all its programs.
(This analysis is one of a series of AAAS R&D
Funding Updates on the FY 2004 appropriations process. This analysis
includes information on R&D in House-Senate conference appropriations
for the Department of Energy. The complete series of AAAS R&D Funding
Updates, including continually updated analyses of R&D by agency
in FY 2004 appropriations, is available on the AAAS
R&D Web Site (http://www.aaas.org/spp/rd) in the “FY
2004 R&D” or the “What’s New” sections.)
- November 10, 2003 (revised December 11)
AAAS R&D Budget and Policy Program
1200 New York Ave, NW
Washington, DC 20005
(202) 326-6607; -6600
www.aaas.org/spp/rd
