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Dept. of Energy R&D in FY 2007 Senate Appropriations PDF
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R&D in the FY 2007 Budget Page
Supplemental
Materials: "House Approves
ACI Boost for DOE Science," AAAS R&D Funding Update on DOE R&D
in FY 2007 House Appropriations "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 -
The Department of Energy’s (DOE) Office of Science (OS) is well on its way
to receiving its full requested increase of 15 percent as part of the President’s
American Competitiveness Initiative (ACI). The Senate would give the Office
a budget of $4.2 billion in 2007, an 18 percent or $645 million increase over
the current year that would bring Science near Cold War highs in real terms (see
Table). -
Both the House and the Senate have now joined the Administration in boosting funding
substantially for every OS program. The Senate would create a new OS program in
High Energy Density Science funded at $80 million, from components of other OS
programs. After adjusting for the new program, the largest OS programs would all
receive increases greater than 8 percent in the Senate plan, including a dramatic
24 percent boost for Nuclear Physics, a 36 percent increase for computing research,
a 28 percent increase for Basic Energy Sciences, and a 31 percent increase for
the core life sciences research portfolio. -
Although President Bush’s request would have reduced the portfolio by 5 percent,
the Senate would boost energy R&D by a dramatic 21 percent over this year
to $1.6 billion. The Senate would leave in place requested increases in many
renewables programs, save other programs from cancellation,
and add funds to requested cuts in conservation and fossil energy programs. 
Figure
1. (click on the image for PDF) -
Total DOE R&D would climb 10 percent or $876 million to $9.6 billion (see
Table). DOE R&D in FY 2007 Senate Appropriations On
June 29, just before a week-long Fourth of July recess, the Senate Appropriations
Committee approved its version of the FY 2007 Energy and Water appropriations
bill (HR 5427), which funds the Department of Energy (DOE), the Corps of Engineers,
and other agencies. The full Senate may debate and most likely approve the bill
later this month. The House approved its version of the bill on May 24. So
far, both the House and now the Senate are strongly supportive of large increases
for DOE’s Office of Science, a centerpiece of President Bush’s
American Competitiveness Initiative (ACI) to boost fundamental physical sciences
research. The Senate would provide a dramatic 18 percent increase in the Science
budget to $4.2 billion, of which $3.9 billion would go for R&D activities
(also up 18 percent; see Table), exceeding the 14
percent requested and 15 percent House-approved increases. The Senate would be
even more generous with DOE’s energy R&D portfolio,
turning a requested cut into a 21 percent increase to $1.6 billion, and would
also turn a requested cut in defense R&D into flat funding of $4.1 billion.
The Senate appropriation for DOE R&D would total $9.6 billion, an $876 million
or 10.0 percent increase over FY 2006. The Senate’s R&D increase would take
up the entire increase and then some for the overall DOE budget, which would total
$24.7 billion in the Senate plan, up 2.8 percent or $678 million. (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. For details of
House appropriations, see the June 2 R&D Funding Update.) In
January, President Bush put DOE’s programs in the spotlight when he announced his 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
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. After
several months of congressional discussions, the House went first by putting real
dollars into these proposals in its version of the Energy-Water bill, supporting
both the ACI science and AEI energy increases. Now the Senate version of the bill
would go even beyond the House mark by supporting DOE’s
energy and science portfolio even more strongly. The Senate mark would reverse
the sliding DOE R&D portfolio of the last few years (see Figure 1), with increases
approaching 20 percent for both science and energy. R&D
in the DOE Office of Science (OS) The
large proposed and now House- and Senate-endorsed increases for DOE Science would
mark a sharp departure from the flat or declining funding trends of recent years
for DOE’s support of the physical sciences and related fields.
Taking out $129 million in 2006 earmarks and $50 million in Senate 2007 earmarks
results in a substantial 21 percent increase in core (non-earmarked) Science R&D
funding between 2006 and 2007. 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, and engineering;
the push by the Bush Administration to boost physical sciences broadly defined
through large increases in the OS budget would pay off for all its research areas.
The total Science budget would climb 18 percent to $4.2 billion in the Senate,
$139 million more than the request and $645 million more than the current budget.
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
17.8 percent in the Senate appropriation to $3.9 billion, again well above both
the request and the House appropriation. The
Senate would create a new program on high-energy density physics in 2007, and
would give it start-up funding of $80 million. The High Energy Density Science
program would cobble together pieces from the Fusion ($12 million), Nuclear Physics
($20 million), High Energy Physics ($8 million), and Inertial Confinement Fusion
($39 million from the defense side of DOE) programs to get its $80 million initial
budget. The Senate report describes the new program’s mission as supporting “research
in inertial fusion energy, fast ignition, petawatt laser
development, plasma accelerators and other laboratory and university sponsored
research related to high energy density science,” with applications ranging from
materials research to fusion research to the fundamental properties of nuclear
matter. Funding
for every existing OS program would increase substantially after several years
of flat or declining budgets (see Figure 2). After adjusting for transfers
to the new 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 28
percent increase for Basic Energy Sciences, and a 31 percent increase for the
core (non-earmarked) life sciences research portfolio. 
Figure
2. (click on the image for PDF) 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) in 2007 would go to operate and construct facilities,
while the other half 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. After several years in which tight budgets have forced the cancellation
of planned construction projects, dramatic reductions in facilities operating
times, and reductions in external research support, the 2007 Senate 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,
and increasing numbers of external researchers would win grants. Basic
Energy Sciences (BES) would get more than half the additional OS dollars in 2007,
after faring the best among Science programs in recent years (see Figure 2). BES
funding would surge 28 percent to $1.5 billion in the 2007 Senate 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 Senate would add $25 million to the request for R&D on water technology
used in the production of energy, including desalination and water treatment research.
The largest increase to $174 million (up $74 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
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 computing capacity that researchers can use for
their experiments, primarily at Oak Ridge,
Argonne, and Lawrence Berkeley laboratories. Biological
and Environmental Research (BER) funding appears to decline in 2007, but the 2006
total includes $129 million in congressional earmarks while the 2007 Senate appropriation
would only have $50 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 allow 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’ budgets there
would also be a robust domestic fusion program. The 11 percent increase for
Fusion Energy Sciences (after adjusting for a transfer to High Energy Density
Science) 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
could siphon off resources from domestic fusion research and facilities. ITER
funding would climb from $19 million to $60 million, leaving enough funding to
keep domestic fusion activities level. In May, the U.S.
and six other partners formally signed an ITER agreement outlining each nation’s
contribution to the project so that construction can begin in France
in 2007. The
High Energy Physics (HEP) program, which funds basic research on the nature of
matter and energy, would get an 8 percent increase to $767 million (after adjusting
for the High Energy Density Science transfer). The increase would allow DOE to
sustain operating times at facilities, boost research funding slightly, increase
support for the Large Hadron Collider
toward the beginning of operations in 2007, and increase the DOE contribution
to $45 million for design and development of the International Linear Collider, the next big international high-energy physics project
(scaled back from a requested $60 million because of Senate concerns that this
multi-billion-dollar project could crowd out other research in the future). The
Senate would also allocate an additional $15 million for a Joint Dark Energy Mission,
a mission that is supposed to be a joint DOE-NASA space probe to try to understand
the dark energy that makes up the majority of the universe. Because of worries
about NASA’s tight budget situation for any projects not related to human space
flight, the Senate provides the additional money to enable DOE to begin planning
the mission on its own. The Nuclear Physics (NP) program would enjoy a 24 percent
(adjusted) surge in funding to $434 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. 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 Senate appropriation would immediately boost funding close to the all-time
highs at the end of the Cold War (see Figure 1). In today’s dollars, the Science
program has been stuck at roughly $3.3 billion since 2001, but the 2007 Senate
appropriation would take it to a new level of close to $3.9 billion. Among
Science’s non-R&D programs, a notable addition in the Senate is $25 million
in additional funding to support math and science training for teachers using
the resources of DOE’s national laboratories, including summer institutes,
partnerships between the labs and local schools, loans of laboratory staff and
equipment to schools, and a fellows program to support graduate education for
science and engineering doctoral candidates in DOE-relevant fields. DOE
Energy R&D The
Senate would reverse an overall requested cut in energy programs to boost total
DOE energy R&D to $1.6 billion, a dramatic 21 percent increase. The Senate
would endorse the President’s requested increases for key renewable energy programs,
but would also boost funding for energy programs the President proposed to eliminate
or reduce. The Bush Administration has consistently favored increases for hydrogen
and fuel cell R&D but in his 2006 State of the Union Address the President
added solar energy and biomass/biofuels to his list
of renewable energy priorities. The Senate would join the House in approving the
large requested increases for hydrogen (up 22 percent to $190 million), biomass
(more than doubling to $213 million), and solar energy (up 79 percent to $148
million). All of these increases would be even larger in reality because the 2006
base includes numerous congressional earmarks, while the House and the Senate
would put most earmarks in a separate account in 2007. (Some of the additional
Senate biomass funding would go to demonstration projects rather than R&D
programs.) In addition, the Senate would preserve the geothermal R&D and hydropower
R&D programs ($23 million and $4 million, respectively), which the Administration
and the House have proposed to eliminate. The Senate would also
sustain the wind energy program at $39
million, level with the current year. The
Senate would add funds to the request in other energy areas. Instead of a
steep 31 percent cut, the Senate would provide $538 million for fossil energy
R&D, a dramatic 12 percent increase. Instead of a requested cut, the Senate
would provide a 16 percent increase for coal research, including $54 million in
FutureGen funding to develop a near-emission-free, coal-fired
electricity and hydrogen plant (triple the 2006 level), $70 million for the Clean
Coal Power Initiative to develop cleaner coal-based power plants instead of a
small $5 million request, and a big increase to $90 million (from $66 million)
for carbon sequestration R&D. Both the House and now the Senate 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 Policy Act 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, which would fall
by half in the Senate appropriation but would nevertheless continue instead of
being eliminated as proposed. The
Senate would also boost funding for energy conservation technologies instead of
the steep cuts in the budget request. The building technologies program to fund
R&D on energy conservation technologies for residential and commercial buildings
would climb $26 million or 38 percent to $95 million, more than offsetting the
cuts in the other two energy conservation programs of vehicle technologies (down
$2 million to $180 million) and industrial technologies (down $9 million to $48
million). Within vehicles, the Senate would provide the request of $109 million
for the ongoing FreedomCar program of R&D on electric
and hybrid propulsion technologies and other projects concerned with reducing
U.S. motor vehicle
oil consumption. The
Senate would also add funds for nuclear energy R&D, with an 11 percent increase
to $131 million within an even larger increase and total appropriation for nuclear
energy. The Global Nuclear Energy Partnership (GNEP), a newly proposed initiative
to recycle spent nuclear fuel, would be fully funded at its requested level of
$250 million by the Senate, with an extra $36 million for nuclear facilities upgrades
thrown in. The GNEP, nuclear demonstration projects, and other non-R&D projects
pushe total nuclear energy spending to $711 million in the
Senate, a nearly 33 percent increase over current funding. As
a result of these broad-based energy R&D increases, the Senate would bring
total DOE energy R&D funding to a level last seen in 1995 in today’s dollars.
For the past decade, energy R&D has dwindled to as low as $1 billion in some
years, but the $1.6 billion Senate appropriation would represent a significant
comeback for these investments. 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 decades of handling nuclear waste. DOE’s
defense R&D to address these responsibilities would increase $2 million to
stay at $4.1 billion in the latest Senate appropriation (see Table).
The core Weapons Activities program, which funds science-based alternatives to
nuclear testing, would receive $6.5 billion in 2007. Roughly half of this funding
goes to support R&D, totaling $3.0 billion in the Senate, a slight increase
of 0.9 percent instead of a requested cut. To keep pace with an increasing reliance
on complex high-end computing simulations of nuclear explosions, the Advanced
Simulation and Computing program would increase 16 percent to $696 million. The
program, the defense counterpart to the nondefense ASCR,
would mostly take place in DOE’s three weapons laboratories
(Los Alamos and Sandia in New
Mexico, Lawrence Livermore in California).
$60 million of the additional Senate funds would go to create the first U.S.
petaflop computer (a billion million operations per
second) at Los Alamos. Senate funding for the Inertial
Confinement Fusion program, however, would fall 24 percent or $131 million down
to $412 million; only $39 million of the cut would be from the transfer to the
new OS High Energy Density Science program, leaving steep cuts in the remaining
program. After
Congress terminated research on the controversial Robust Nuclear Earth Penetrator
(RNEP) in 2006, DOE hopes to move on to other nuclear weapons projects. The Administration
proposal to initiate research on a new generation of nuclear weapons, including
RNEP and other tactical or ‘low-yield’ weapons, has been opposed by Congress so
far because these weapons would require the repeal of a U.S. ban on developing
new nuclear weapons. Instead, DOE proposes to move forward on the Reliable Replacement
Warhead (RRW) project, initiated by Congress in 2005 to explore the possibility
of new warhead designs to use with existing rather than new nuclear weapons. DOE
requested $28 million in 2007 for the RRW, but the Senate would more than double
current funding with an appropriation of $63 million. Outlook
and Next Steps The
full Senate may debate and approve its Energy-Water bill in July. The House has
already approved its version, so it is possible that the bill will be one of the
few appropriations bills to emerge from House-Senate conference and be signed
into law before the October 1 start of the new fiscal year. But if past patterns
hold, the conference could have difficulties reaching agreements on the hundreds
of budget line items in the bill, and a final Energy-Water bill may not be enacted
until well after the November elections. (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.)
-
July 7, 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
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