AAAS R&D Funding Update on R&D in DOE FY 2007 House Appropriations (corrected 6/2 in [ ] ) -

House Approves ACI Boost for DOE Science

Go to: -Table. Dept. of Energy R&D in FY 2007 House Appropriations PDF version of this document Main R&D in the FY 2007 Budget Page Supplemental Materials: "DOE Science Gains 14 Percent, Energy R&D Slides in 2007 Budget," AAAS R&D Funding Update on R&D in the FY 2007 DOE Budget AAAS Analysis of R&D in the FY 2007 Budget

Highlights - In the first indication of congressional support for the President's American Competitiveness Initiative (ACI), the House has approved $3.8 billion for the Department of Energy's (DOE) Office of Science (OS) R&D portfolio, matching the request for a substantial 15 percent increase (see Table). - After several years of flat or declining budgets, the House would join the Administration in boosting funding substantially for every OS program. The largest OS programs would all receive increases of 8 percent or more, including a dramatic boost of 24 percent for Nuclear Physics after a decade of stagnant funding, a 36 percent increase for computing research, a 25 percent increase for Basic Energy Sciences, and a 31 percent increase for the core life sciences research portfolio. - Total DOE R&D would increase $605 million or 6.9 percent to $9.3 billion in the House appropriation (see Table). - Although President Bush's request would have reduced overall DOE energy R&D 4.8 percent, the House would leave in place requested increases in many renewables programs and add funds to energy conservation and fossil energy programs, resulting in a 2007 DOE energy R&D investment of $1.4 billion, an 8 percent increase over this year. Substantial increases for R&D on hydrogen, fuel cells, biomass, and solar technologies proposed by DOE would remain, and proposed cuts in coal research, natural gas research, and buildings conservation R&D would be moderated. - The House would add to the request for DOE's defense R&D for a total of $4.1 billion, just $5 million less than the current year.  DOE R&D in FY 2007 House Appropriations  On May 24, the full House approved its version of the FY 2007 Energy-Water appropriations bill (HR 5427), which funds the Department of Energy (DOE), the Corps of Engineers, and other agencies. As one of the first appropriations bills to be approved, it offers the first indication of congressional support for President Bush’s American Competitiveness Initiative (ACI) to boost fundamental research in the physical sciences. So far, the House is strongly supportive of large increases for DOE’s Office of Science, a key ACI player, agreeing to a 15 percent increase in the Science budget to $4.1 billion, of which $3.8 billion would go to R&D (also up 15 percent; see Table). Along with House actions to reverse proposed cuts to energy R&D and to moderate proposed cuts in defense R&D, total DOE R&D would climb $605 million or 6.9 percent to $9.3 billion in the House plan. (For details of the request for DOE R&D, please see Chapter 9 of AAAS Report XXXI: R&D FY 2007 or the February 24 DOE R&D Funding Update.)  In January, President Bush put DOE's programs in the spotlight when he announced an American Competitiveness Initiative (ACI) to boost physical sciences research and an Advanced Energy Initiative (AEI) to boost alternative energy R&D. His February FY 2007 budget featured increases for DOE R&D funding at a time when most other agencies face declining budgets. DOE's Office of Science (OS) is the largest federal sponsor of physical sciences research and is one of three federal agencies (the other two are the National Science Foundation and the National Institute of Standards and Technology laboratories) that would receive substantial R&D increases to fulfill the ACI's physical sciences goals. DOE's energy R&D portfolio funds R&D on a variety of energy topics, including renewable energy R&D on the new Administration priorities of hydrogen, solar power, and biomass energy, all of which would receive substantial increases, although these increase would have been matched by cuts in other energy R&D programs. After several months of congressional discussion of these two initiatives, the House finally had the chance to put real dollars into these proposals, and the Energy-Water appropriations bill offers an early indication that Congress will support ACI increases for fundamental research and AEI increases for renewables research. Within a total DOE budget of $24.4 billion that would remain nearly flat, the House would strongly support the DOE R&D portfolio in energy and science. The DOE R&D portfolio in FY 2007 would total $9.3 billion, an increase of $605 million or 6.9 percent that would reverse the sliding DOE R&D portfolio of the last few years (see Figure 1).   Figure 1. (click on the image for PDF) R&D in the DOE Office of Science (OS) DOE's Office of Science has long been the dominant federal sponsor of physical sciences research, especially in physics and related fields. It is also a large sponsor of computer sciences, mathematics, environmental sciences, materials research, nanotechnology, mathematics, and engineering; the push by the Bush Administration to boost physical sciences research broadly defined through large increases in the OS budget would pay off for all of the Office's research areas, and now the House has endorsed these large increases. The total Science budget would climb 14.9 percent to $4.1 billion, a $535 million increase that is identical to the request except for an extra $30 million in House earmarks. More than 90 percent of the Science budget goes to R&D activities, with the remainder going to administrative and operating costs. Science R&D would gain 15.3 percent in the FY 2007 budget to $3.8 billion, again the same as the request except for $30 million in earmarks. Taking out nearly $130 million in 2006 earmarks and the 2007 House earmarks would mean that core (non-earmarked) Science R&D funding would climb 19 percent between 2006 and 2007. The large proposed and now House-approved increase would mark a sharp departure from the flat or declining funding trends of recent years (see Figure 1). After several years of flat or declining budgets, funding for every OS program would increase substantially. The largest OS programs would all receive increases of 8 percent or more, including a dramatic boost of 24 percent for Nuclear Physics after a decade of stagnant funding, a 36 percent increase for computing research, a 25 percent increase for Basic Energy Sciences, and a 31 percent increase for the core (non-earmarked) life sciences research portfolio. (see Figure 2). OS programs support cutting-edge research through a mix of laboratory research at DOE's national laboratories, university-based research, and the construction and operation of large scientific user facilities that can be used by external researchers for their experiments. Roughly half of OS R&D funding ($1.8 billion) would go to operate and construct facilities, while the other half ($1.9 billion) would support research, mostly at DOE laboratories ($1.1 billion) but a large portion at universities ($600 million, with the remainder going to other types of institutions). The laboratory research and large facilities are housed primarily at ten Office of Science laboratories around the nation that are federally owned and contractor operated, such as the Oak Ridge National Laboratory in Tennessee, Brookhaven National Laboratory in New York, and Argonne National Laboratory in Illinois. After facing several years in which tight budgets have forced the cancellation of planned facilities construction projects, dramatic reductions in facilities operating times (resulting in one facility being forced to accept private donations to keep operating in 2006), and reductions in external research support, the 2007 House appropriation would allow OS to have the best of all worlds: new facilities would come on line and others would begin construction, operating times for users would be expanded at existing facilities, and increasing numbers of external researchers could win research grants. Figure 2. (click on the image for PDF) Basic Energy Sciences (BES) is the OS program that has fared the best even in the tough budget conditions of recent years, would get more than half the additional OS dollars in 2007 (see Figure 2). BES funding would surge 25 percent to $1.4 billion in the 2007 request and House appropriation across the entire range of BES programs, from materials sciences, nanotechnology research, and basic hydrogen research to ramped-up construction of the Linac Coherent Light Source (LCLS) in California. The largest increase to $171 million (up $71 million) would go to operations of the Spallation Neutron Source (SNS) at Oak Ridge in Tennessee, which would have its first full year of operations in 2007. BES also takes the lead in DOE's nanotechnology efforts with a $51 million requested increase to $254 million for research and 5 nanoscale research facilities. The largest percentage increase of 36 percent would go to Advanced Scientific Computing Research (ASCR) which leads DOE's efforts in high-performance computing for research applications. The $319 million 2007 appropriation would boost high performance computing capacity that researchers can use for their experiments, primarily at Oak Ridge, Argonne, and Lawrence Berkeley laboratories. In 2007, ASCR would work toward achieving 250 teraflop computing capabilities to run the most complicated and detailed scientific models. The Biological and Environmental Research (BER) program appears to decline in 2007, but the 2006 total includes $129 million in congressional earmarks, while the 2007 House appropriation would only have $30 million. As a result, non-earmarked BER funding would climb 12 percent to $510 million, including a 31 percent boost for the Life Sciences program to $264 million, to pay for a dramatic expansion of the Genomes to Life program and a boost for the Joint Genome Institute's sequencing capacity. The U.S. contribution to the multinational International Thermonuclear Experimental Reactor (ITER) would go full speed ahead in 2007, but unlike in past years' requests there would also be a robust domestic fusion program. The 11 percent increase to $319 million for Fusion Energy Sciences would be a sharp break from the flat funding of recent years (see Figure 2), and would alleviate congressional concerns that U.S. participation in ITER construction could siphon off resources from domestic fusion research and facilities. ITER funding would climb from $19 million to $60 million in 2007, leaving enough funding to keep domestic fusion activities nearly level. The $5 billion international project had been delayed because the international partners were unable to agree on a site, but in 2005 a site in France was chosen, a director was selected, and construction got underway. Last week, the U.S. and the six other partners formally signed an agreement outlining each nation's contribution to the project so that construction can begin in 2007. The High Energy Physics (HEP) program, which funds basic research on the nature of matter and energy, would get an 8.3 percent increase to $775 million (see Table). The increase would allow DOE to sustain operating times at facilities, boost research funding slightly, increase support for the LHC toward the beginning of operations in 2007, and double the DOE contribution to $60 million for design and development of the International Linear Collider, the next big international high-energy physics project. The Nuclear Physics program (NP) would enjoy a 23.7 percent surge in funding to $454 million after being stuck at $400 million in today's dollars for nearly a decade (see Figure 2). NP seeks to understand the structure and interactions of subatomic particles, and supports two large facilities, the Thomas Jefferson National Accelerator Facility in Virginia and the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider (RHIC) in New York. After yet another year of flat appropriations in the 2006 budget, the program was forced to announce the termination of operations at RHIC, and in an embarrassing turn of events was only able to keep the facility operating because of a private donation. But the large 2007 increase would provide full funding for facility operations at all NP facilities and also money to initiate new facilities construction and upgrades. 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, but the 2007 budget could be a reversal of fortune (see Figure 1). In today's dollars, the Science program has been stuck at roughly $3.3 billion since FY 2001, but the large 2007 request and now House appropriation would represent a decisive break from recent trends. DOE Energy R&D Programs The House would reverse an overall requested cut in energy programs to boost total DOE energy R&D to $1.4 billion, an 8 percent increase. In so doing, the House would endorse the President's support for key renewable energy programs. The Bush Administration has consistently favored increases for hydrogen and fuel cell R&D as investments in a promising energy source for the future, but in his 2006 State of the Union address the President added solar energy and biomass energy to his list of renewable energy priorities. The House would approve the large requested increases of 26 percent for hydrogen technology, 65 percent for biomass R&D, and 79 percent for solar energy R&D, all increases that would be even larger in reality because the 2006 base (but not the 2007 appropriation) includes congressional earmarks. The House would put its earmarks in a separate account in 2007. R&D in the Energy Supply and Conservation account, which combines the formerly separate Energy Supply and Energy Conservation programs and which funds these renewables efforts and other programs, [would climb 17 percent to $914 million] (see Table). The House would add funds to the request in other areas, particularly fossil energy R&D. Instead of a steep 31 percent cut down to $330 million, the House would provide $471 million, a 1.6 percent cut. The House would add funds to turn a requested cut into a small increase to $387 million for coal research, including $54 million in FutureGen funding to develop a near-emission-free, coal-fired electricity and hydrogen production plant (triple the 2006 level), $36 million for the Clean Coal Power Initiative program to develop cleaner coal-based power plants, and a boost to $74 million for carbon sequestration R&D. The House would leave in place a $50 million new entitlement program in FY 2007 for deepwater and unconventional gas R&D that was created in the energy bill of 2005, unlike the request which proposed to cancel it. The new program would take over some of the work currently funded in the oil and natural gas R&D programs. But the House would leave in place steep requested cuts to other energy R&D programs. The budget request and now the House would eliminate the $23 million geothermal R&D program, and also eliminate the dwindling hydropower R&D program. The Nuclear Energy R&D portfolio would tumble 36 percent in the House bill to $75 million. In the fossil energy R&D programs, the House would agree with the proposal to all-but-eliminate the oil technology program for a $30 million savings, and would eliminate the Natural Gas Technology program, also, although the House would keep a portion of the portfolio alive with $12 million for a new methane hydrates program (see Table). The House would add to requested cuts in energy conservation R&D programs, but not enough to keep funding from declining in areas such as vehicle energy conservation and industrial conservation technologies. A mostly non-R&D nuclear energy program that has become the focus of the energy portfolio would be reduced by the House. The Global Nuclear Energy Partnership (GNEP), a newly proposed initiative to recycle spent nuclear fuel, would be reduced from a request of $250 million down to $150 million, nearly entirely in the Nuclear Energy account. Although the House bill is generally supportive of the GNEP concept, the House expresses strong reservations about the way GNEP is structured and the lack of detailed information provided by DOE on how the program would work. The House also criticizes DOE for appearing to favor GNEP over the pending Yucca Mountain nuclear-waste repository site, and shifts some of the requested GNEP funds to Yucca Mountain programs.  DOE Defense R&D DOE and its predecessors have long had responsibility for managing the nation's nuclear weapons stockpile, supplying nuclear reactors to the Navy, and dealing with the environmental legacies of nuclear weapons work. DOE's defense R&D to address these responsibilities would decline $5 million to $4.1 billion in the latest House plan (see Table). The core Weapons Activities program, which funds science-based alternatives to nuclear testing in order to maintain the U.S. nuclear weapons stockpile, would receive $6.4 billion in 2007. Roughly half of this portfolio goes to R&D activities, totaling $2.9 billion in the House appropriation, a decline of $15 million or 0.5 percent. To keep pace with an increasing reliance on complex high-end computing simulations of nuclear explosions, the Advanced Simulation and Computing program would increase 5.9 percent to $635 million. The program, the defense counterpart to the nondefense ASCR program, would mostly take place in DOE's three weapons laboratories (Los Alamos and Sandia in New Mexico, Lawrence Livermore in California). After Congress terminated research on the controversial Robust Nuclear Earth Penetrator (RNEP) program in 2006, DOE would move on to other nuclear weapons projects. The Administration proposal to initiate research on a new generation of nuclear weapons, including the RNEP and other tactical or 'low-yield' nuclear weapons (also called 'bunker buster' bombs), has been opposed by Congress so far because building these weapons would require the repeal of a U.S. ban on developing new nuclear weapons. Instead, DOE would move forward on the Reliable Replacement Warhead (RRW) project, a 5-year, $98 million project initiated by Congress in the FY 2005 budget that would explore the possibility of new warhead designs to use with existing rather than new nuclear weapons. DOE requests $28 million in 2007 for the RRW, but the House would boost funding to $53 million, more than double current funding. Outlook for the DOE Budget and Funding Impacts Now that the House has approved the Energy-Water bill, attention turns to the Senate. The Senate version of the bill, however, may not be drafted until July or later, so it may be weeks before Senate support for the American Competitiveness Initiative can be gauged. DOE’s FY 2007 House appropriation would result in substantial increases for DOE research funding.  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. As shown in Figure 3, more than a third of this research portfolio goes to support of the physical sciences, a third to engineering research, and the remainder to the computer sciences, mathematics, and other disciplines.    Figure 3. (click on the image for PDF) This DOE support for the physical sciences is crucial to the health of the U.S. physical sciences enterprise. DOE is the largest single federal agency sponsor for the physical sciences. 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 scientific user facilities at its national laboratories which are used by scientists of all disciplines. 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 2007 request and House appropriation continue the recent emphasis, but should allow DOE support for all disciplines to increase dramatically. Nearly two-thirds of DOE's R&D is performed in DOE's 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. (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.) - May 31, 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

Table. Department of Energy
House Appropriations Committee Action on R&D in the FY 2007 Budget
(budget authority in millions of dollars)
			Action by House
	FY 2006	FY 2007	FY 2007	Chg. from Request		Chg. from FY 2006
	Estimate	Request	HOUSE	Amount	Percent	Amount	Percent
DOE Appropriations Containing R&D:
1.  Energy Supply & Conservation 1/	780	888	914	26	2.9%	134	17.2%
2.  Science	3,320	3,798	3,828	30	0.8%	508	15.3%
3.  Fossil Energy R&D	479	330	471	141	42.8%	-8	-1.6%
4.  Atomic Energy Defense Activities	4,062	3,975	4,057	82	2.1%	-5	-0.1%
5.  Radioactive Waste Management	80	56	56	0	0.0%	-24	-30.0%
	______	______	______	______		______
Total DOE R&D	8,721	9,047	9,326	279	3.1%	605	6.9%
1. Energy Supply and Conservation 1/
Efficiency and Renewables 1/	530	670	697	27	4.1%	167	31.6%
- Hydrogen Technology	156	196	196	0	0.0%	40	25.8%
- Biomass and Biorefinery Sys.	91	150	150	0	0.0%	59	65.0%
- Solar Energy	83	148	148	0	0.0%	65	78.5%
- Wind Energy	39	44	44	0	0.0%	5	12.8%
- Geothermal Tech.	23	0	0	0	- -	-23	-100.0%
- Hydropower	0	0	0	0	- -	0	-100.0%
- Vehicle Tech.	182	166	178	12	6.9%	-5	-2.5%
- Building Tech.	69	77	93	16	20.3%	24	34.3%
- Industrial Tech.	57	46	52	6	13.2%	-5	-9.3%
- Congressional projects 3/	0	0	23	23	- -	23	- -
- minus demos & other non-R&D	-170	-157	-186	-29	18.7%	-16	9.3%
Electricity Delivery & Reliability	132	123	142	19	15.3%	10	7.4%
Nuclear Energy	118	95	75	-20	-21.2%	-43	-36.4%
	______	______	______	______		______
TOTAL Energy Supply 1/	780	888	914	26	2.9%	134	17.2%
2. Science
High Energy Physics	716	775	775	0	0.0%	59	8.3%
Nuclear Physics	367	454	454	0	0.0%	87	23.7%
Fusion Energy Sciences	288	319	319	0	0.0%	31	10.7%
Basic Energy Sciences	1,134	1,421	1,421	0	0.0%	287	25.3%
Adv. Scientific Computing Res.	235	319	319	0	-0.1%	84	35.6%
Biological and Environmental Res.	580	510	540	30	5.9%	-40	-6.9%
	______	______	______	______		______
TOTAL Science R&D	3,320	3,798	3,828	30	0.8%	508	15.3%
Science Non-R&D Items	276	304	304	0	0.0%	27	9.9%
	______	______	______	______		______
Total Science Budget (incl nonR&D)	3,596	4,102	4,132	30	0.7%	535	14.9%
3. Fossil Energy R&D 2/ (does not include non-R&D components)
Coal Research	376	330	387	57	17.1%