Highlights
- R&D in the Department of Transportation (DOT) falls by $58 million
or 8.2 percent to $644 million in FY 2004 (see Table).
- The cuts hit both of DOT’s major R&D agencies, the Federal Aviation
Administration (FAA) and the Federal Highway Administration (FHWA), both of which are primarily funded through
trust funds.
Four months
after the start of FY 2004, Congress gave final approval on January
22 to the FY 2004 omnibus appropriations bill (HR 2673) that sets final
funding levels for DOT and several other R&D funding agencies. The
House approved the omnibus bill on December 8, and President Bush is
expected to sign the bill into law by the end of January. The omnibus
bill provides $644 million for
DOT R&D in FY 2004, $58 million or 8.2 percent less than in FY 2003
(see Table). The total DOT budget, however,
increases by $3.0 billion or 5.3 percent to $58.6 billion, with the
lion’s share of the increase going to the Federal Highway Administration
(FHWA), whose budget rises by $2.2 billion to $34.6 billion. (For information
on the President’s request for DOT R&D of $693 million in FY 2004,
see Chapter 13 of AAAS Report XXVIII: R&D FY 2004.) (Note:
all figures in the Table have been adjusted to reflect across-the-board
cuts contained in the omnibus bill.)
Transportation
funding increased dramatically beginning in FY 1999 as a result of the
six-year (FY 1998-2003) reauthorization of transportation programs known
as the Transportation Equity Act for the 21st Century (TEA-21).
The law expired last September, and a temporary funding authorization
is in place through February (2004) until Congress can agree on a new
reauthorization law in 2004. The old law specified that transportation
tax revenues would be devoted exclusively to transportation, and specified
formulas for allocating these funds. As a result of burgeoning revenues
from transportation taxes, DOT’s budget climbed from $44 billion in
FY 1998 all the way to $67 billion in FY 2001. However, these revenues
have dropped off significantly in recent years as a result of a stagnant
economy, and thus total DOT funding has leveled off. In addition, the
Transportation Security Administration (TSA) and the Coast Guard transferred
to the new Department of Homeland Security (DHS) in March of this year,
bringing the DOT budget down to its current level (TSA and Coast Guard
funding is excluded from DOT for all years in the Table).
President Bush
proposed a reauthorization of TEA-21 and Congress tried to approve a
reauthorization bill before TEA-21 expired, but became bogged down in
disputes over whether to increase the federal gasoline tax. In the absence
of an authorization bill, the FY 2004 omnibus bill mostly assumes extension
of TEA-21 provisions into FY 2004, except for significant changes in
highway funding.
Transportation tax revenues continue to be flat
in the stagnant U.S.
economy. The Bush Administration’s proposed DOT budget for FY 2004 extended
TEA-21-mandated cuts into FY 2004 for a total DOT budget of $54.3 billion
in FY 2004, a decline from $55.7 billion in FY 2003. Congress, however,
voted to use general discretionary funds and borrow from balances in
the Highway Trust Fund to prevent these cuts from taking place. Thus,
the omnibus bill provides $58.6 billion for DOT in FY 2004, $4.4 billion
above the Administration request. The Federal Highway Administration
(FHWA), the primary beneficiary of this restoration, sees its FY 2004
budget rise $2.2 billion to $34.6 billion instead of the $30.2 billion
proposed by the Administration (see Table).
FHWA R&D, however, falls 15.3
percent to $246 million in the omnibus bill. The Administration had proposed a
reshuffling of the FHWA accounts to allow for more spending on highway R&D
at the expense of funds to state and local governments, but the congressional
plan maximizes state and local highway construction and maintenance funding.
FHWA spending on surface transportation research falls steeply, mostly DOT
laboratory-performed research on pavement technologies, safety, and
environmental impacts. The FHWA total includes $50 million for R&D in the Intelligent Transportation Systems (ITS)
program, the same as FY 2003. The majority of FHWA R&D funding goes to
state and local governments for their transportation-related research projects;
this funding remains unchanged from the FY 2003 funding level.
The Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) receives $250 million for R&D
activities, a decline of 7.9 percent. FAA’s R&D addresses a number
of aviation-related topics, including weather research, aircraft safety
technology, human factors research, and development of ‘free flight’
technologies to improve aviation system capacity. The FAA’s R&D
portfolio used to be much larger in the $300 to $400 million range annually
before the September 2001 terrorist attacks, but most of its aviation
security R&D portfolio was transferred to the Transportation Security
Administration (TSA) within DOT in FY 2002, and is now housed within
the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), TSA’s new home as of last
March.
Figure 1.
(click on the image to view or download a color,
full-size PDF version of the chart)
Because of large
increases for DOT R&D in FY 2001 and FY 2002 responding to the September
11 terrorist attacks on U.S. aviation, the agency's support for R&D
reached a recent high in FY 2002, after adjusting for inflation. DOT's
R&D crested in FY 1995 and then suffered a steep decline, particularly
in the FAA, as a result of efforts to bring the federal budget into
surplus (see Figure 1). Because of guaranteed funding in TEA-21 and
AIR21, FAA and FHWA R&D then increased in the late 1990s, and with
the help of emergency R&D funds for aviation security R&D in
the aftermath of September 11 rose above the FY 1995 level in FY 2002.
But with the transfer of aviation security R&D to the TSA, which
itself transferred out of DOT to the new DHS, and recent reductions
in transportation tax revenues, DOT R&D has declined sharply in
FY 2003 and now FY 2004.
Figure 2.
(click on the image to view or download a color,
full-size PDF version of the chart)
The majority of DOT’s R&D is
performed by intramural laboratories and industrial performers (see Figure 2.
Universities and colleges perform just 5 percent DOT’s R&D. Unlike the
other large R&D funding agencies, a large proportion (most of the ‘other’
category) is performed by state and local governments. Most of this money comes
from the FHWA under formula grants determined by the highway authorization
bill.
Figure 3.
(click on the image to view or download a color,
full-size PDF version of the chart)
Nearly half of DOT’s research
(excluding development and R&D facilities) is in the engineering sciences
(see Figure 3), particularly in civil engineering, but DOT also is a key
federal funding source for research in psychology and physics. DOT is only the
sixth-largest supporter of engineering research despite its importance in the
DOT portfolio, funding just 2 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 2 percent of total federal support for
psychology, mostly into the role of human factors in aviation safety.
Next Steps
The House approved
the omnibus bill on December 8, and the Senate gave final approval on
January 22. Until a final budget is signed, DOT is operating at last
year's funding levels under a continuing resolution extending through
January 31; President Bush is expected to sign the bill into law by
then.
(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 final FY 2004 appropriations
for the Department of Transportation. The complete series of AAAS R&D
Funding Updates, including continually updated analyses of R&D 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.)
- December 10, 2003 (revised January 23)
AAAS R&D Budget and Policy Program
1200 New York Ave, NW
Washington, DC 20005
(202) 326-6607; -6600
www.aaas.org/spp/rd
