On June 20, the House Appropriations Committee released
its version of the FY 2002 Transportation appropriations bill (HR 2299),
which provides funding for the Department of Transportation (DOT). The
bill now goes to the House floor. The House Transportation bill would
provide $751 million for DOT R&D, a slight $4 million or 0.5 percent
more than the FY 2001 funding level, and significantly less than
the President's request (see Table). The
total DOT budget would swell by $1.2 billion or 2.1 percent to $59.1
billion, mostly because of guaranteed funding increases provided in
recent highway and aviation authorization bills.
Much of the spending in the Transportation bill is
exempt from limits on discretionary spending set out in spending caps
and the annual budget resolution because of three new categories of
discretionary spending created in the Transportation Equity Act for
the 21st Century (TEA-21) of 1998 and the Aviation
Investment and Reform Act for the 21st Century (AIR21) of 2000.
TEA-21, a six-year reauthorization bill for most highway and transit
programs, dedicates all highway and transit trust fund receipts to transportation
and creates two new categories of discretionary spending (highways and
transit programs) for that purpose. Spending in these two categories
is determined by receipts from transportation taxes and not by legislative
limits. (Previously, Congress had diverted a substantial portion of
transportation receipts to other discretionary programs, which had the
effect of limiting transportation spending.) AIR21 provides TEA21-like
guarantees of increased funding for many FAA programs beginning in FY
2001. Although these three categories of spending contain guaranteed
funding levels, the spending totals are nevertheless counted within
total discretionary spending, meaning that other transportation programs
and other discretionary programs come under budgetary pressure if spending
in these three categories increases.
Because transportation revenues have been rising and
all these revenues are required to be spent on transportation, the House
Transportation bill is relatively generous toward the two primary beneficiaries
of TEA-21 spending, the Federal Highway Administration (FHWA; $32.7
billion, down 2.3 percent) and the Federal Transit Administration (FTA;
$6.7 billion, up 7.9 percent). Most FHWA programs would see funding
increases; the FHWA budget declines only because the House bill would
not renew funding for billions of dollars in congressionally designated
projects added to the FY 2001 Transportation bill. In FY 2002, the Federal
Aviation Administration (FAA) would receive $13.0 billion (up 8.3 percent),
an increase made possible because of guaranteed funding for many FAA
programs contained in AIR21.
Most other DOT agencies, which are funded primarily
or partially from general discretionary funds, would see mixed results
because of tight constraints on discretionary spending necessitated
by large increases in the guaranteed accounts. General discretionary
spending for transportation would decline more than 10 percent in the
House bill, and several DOT R&D programs would share in the cut.
FHWA's R&D programs would receive $312 million,
a gain of $18 million or 6.2 percent over FY 2001, mostly because of
the guaranteed funding in TEA-21. The Administration's request was for
$374 million, but the House would deny the request to divert some program
administration and other non-R&D funds to increased R&D investments.
The FHWA total would include $49 million for R&D in the Intelligent
Transportation Systems (ITS) program. There would be increases for
most FHWA R&D programs, though not as significant as those proposed
by the Administration.
The Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) would
receive $311 million for R&D activities, an increase of 3.2
percent. FAA's R&D, however, totaled well over $300 million annually
in the early 1990s until FY 1995, and then declined sharply due to budget
cuts.
The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration
(NHTSA) would receive $57 million for R&D in FY 2002, down slightly
from this year. Most of NHTSA's R&D involves highway safety research
and the development of new safety-related technologies. The House bill
would eliminate R&D in the new Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration
(FMCSA) because of budget constraints, but the bill report states that
if more budgetary resources were available the FMCSA R&D program
would be worthy of support.
The majority of DOT's R&D is performed by intramural
laboratories and industrial performers. Universities and colleges perform
about a tenth of DOT's R&D, and a similar proportion is performed
by state and local governments.
Two-thirds of DOT's research (excluding development
and R&D facilities) is in the engineering sciences, particularly
in civil engineering, but DOT also is a key federal funding source for
research in psychology and physics. DOT is only the fifth-largest supporter
of engineering research despite its importance in the DOT portfolio,
funding 5 percent of all federal support for engineering. The major
sponsors of engineering research are the Department of Defense and the
National Aeronautics and Space Administration, with about a third each
of total federal support, followed by the Department of Energy and National
Science Foundation. FAA funds 5 percent of total federal support for
psychology, mostly into the role of human factors in aviation safety.
The Transportation bill is the second of the 13 appropriations
bills to move to the House floor. The Senate version of the bill will
be delayed because the Senate has yet to fully reorganize after the
unexpected shift of control from the Republicans to the Democrats earlier
this month.
- June 26, 2001
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/R&D
