(This analysis highlights AAAS
interpretations of R&D earmarks in FY 2006 appropriations bills
as of the August congressional recess. The complete series of AAAS
R&D Funding Updates, including continually updated analyses of
R&D by agency in FY 2006 appropriations, is available on the AAAS
R&D Web Site (http://www.aaas.org/spp/rd) in the "FY
2006 R&D" or the "What's New"
sections.)
- At this stage of the FY 2006
appropriations process, House R&D
earmarks are running behind the record-setting levels of the past two
years because of tight budget targets, according
to the AAAS analysis of congressionally designated, performer-specific
R&D projects in the FY 2006 appropriations bills so far (see Table
A and Figure 1). But the Senate is on a record-setting pace for
earmarking.
- In the House’s
appropriations bills, R&D earmarks total $1.0 billion while the
Senate is on track to earmark far more with $951 million so far, a total
that excludes DOD, the largest R&D funding agency. Although the
House earmarks are less than 1 percent of total R&D, they are concentrated:
four agencies (DOD, $563 million; USDA, $183 million; DOE, $167 million;
and NASA, $50 million) receive 94 percent of House R&D earmarks,
while NIH, NSF, DHS, and other agencies are earmark-free.
- In some programs,
earmarks make up 1 out of every 5 program dollars. The Senate would
earmark more than 20 percent of the NOAA and USDA extramural R&D
portfolios, and 15 percent of energy R&D.
- FY 2006 R&D
earmarks could reach the $1.9 billion total last year or the $2.1 billion
total in FY 2005 if House and Senate earmarks are added together in
final budgets.
FY 2006 R&D Earmarks in FY 2006 Appropriations: House Restraint and
Senate Largess
At the August congressional recess, congressional
appropriators are about halfway through the FY 2006 appropriations process
with just four weeks of legislative action in September before the October
1 start of the fiscal year. Congress has finalized just two appropriations
bills; the House has approved all of its versions of the bills, while
the Senate has at least drafted all of its bills except the largest
one covering the Department of Defense (DOD). For the largest R&D
funding agencies, final FY 2006 budgets have been decided for two (Department
of the Interior and EPA), only the House has approved the DOD budget,
and the House and the Senate have separate appropriations for the remaining
agencies which must be reconciled this fall.
Appropriators are
working under restrictive budget targets in writing these appropriations
bill: while the congressional budget plan allows for a large increase
in defense spending, domestic programs are being squeezed below this
year’s funding levels. Both House and Senate appropriators have eased
the restrictions slightly by diverting billions of dollars from defense
to domestic programs, but domestic spending is still likely to be flat
next year. In addition, the Senate has found billions of dollars through
accounting tricks, but it is unlikely that the House will accept them
in final budget negotiations.
The FY
2006 appropriations bills so far contain, as usual, numerous congressionally
designated, performer-specific R&D projects (R&D earmarks).
But in a change from the pattern of recent years, the tight budget constraints
appear so far to have curbed earmarking in the House. House R&D
earmarks so far total $1.0 billion, less than half the record-setting
$2.1 billion R&D earmarks total for FY 2005. The Senate, meanwhile,
has not acted on the DOD budget, traditionally the most-earmarked agency,
but its $951 million total is well above the House’s pace and is on
track to match the record-setting totals of the past two years. The
final earmark total will depend on whether negotiators tend to add House
earmarks to Senate earmarks for a larger total, split the difference,
or pick and choose earmarks to get to the lower level; over the years,
appropriators have used all of these strategies to craft final appropriations
bills, depending on the year and on budget conditions for a particular
agency. (For full details of federal R&D appropriations so far in
the FY 2006 process, please see the August Status Report
on R&D in FY 2006 Appropriations, available on the AAAS
R&D Web site).
- R&D earmarks in House appropriations bills total $1.0 billion in
FY 2006. Although these projects amount to only 0.8 percent of total
R&D, they are concentrated in a few key agencies and programs (see
Table A). Four agencies (the U.S. Department
of Agriculture (USDA; $183 million), the National Aeronautics and Space
Administration (NASA; $50 million), the Department of Energy (DOE; $167
million) and the Department of Defense (DOD; $563 million) receive 94
percent of the House’s R&D earmarks, far more concentrated than
in previous years (see Figure 1).
Figure 1.
(click on image for PDF)
- The Senate is on track to provide even more earmarks. Even without DOD,
the Senate FY 2006 earmarks total is $951 million (see Table
A and Figure 1), representing 1.5 percent of R&D appropriations
so far. The Senate would earmark $198 million of the
NOAA R&D portfolio, a record, and would also heavily earmark DOE’s energy R&D portfolio and the USDA extramural research
portfolio. R&D earmarks would be nearly 25 percent of NOAA R&D,
more than 20 percent of USDA’s extramural research program, and nearly
15 percent of DOE’s energy R&D portfolio.
- The USDA earmarks total $183 million in the House and $293 million in
the Senate. Many of the earmarks are in the nearly entirely earmarked
Special Research Grants program, funded at $107 million in the House
and $110 million in the Senate for a partially overlapping set of projects,
but they are also found in other parts of USDA’s Cooperative State Research,
Education, and Extension Service (CSREES), in intramural research projects
in the Agricultural Research Service (ARS), and for intramural R&D
facilities construction. In the Senate, R&D earmarks total 22 percent
of all extramural R&D in the Cooperative State Research, Education,
and Extension Service (CSREES), making these a significant drain on
resources that might have gone to competitively awarded research grants;
the House ratio is 20 percent. Although the Administration proposed
$250 million for the competitive National Research Initiative, both
the House and the Senate would appropriate far less.
- The NASA projects total $50 million in the House and the Senate, but in an unusual move appropriators have declined to specify them,
setting aside the money now but keeping the lists of actual projects
secret until the final NASA budget is decided this fall. Because of
tight budgets at NASA, faced with the immense challenges of returning
the Space Shuttle to flight, resuming construction of the International
Space Station and embarking on R&D for moon-and-Mars missions, all
within a relatively flat budget, appropriators have so far kept earmarks
below the $200 million-a-year levels of previous years.
- In a sign that
appropriators go where the money is, the House
would earmark $563 million of the DOD
budget, more than half the House total just as DOD is more than half
the federal R&D portfolio. Clearly,
in a fiscal environment where defense spending is half of all discretionary
spending and the only mission to receive a large increase, DOD is an
attractive target for earmarks. The earmarks are mostly small ($10 million
or less) projects, but significantly most are for research rather than
development or R&D facilities construction, squeezing basic research
and applied research budgets. Earmarks for “6.1” (basic research) programs
total $55 million, or 4 percent of the total; “6.2” (applied research)
earmarks are $146 million, or 3 percent of the total because of a large
number of medical research projects. But earmarks in the “6.4” or higher
categories of DOD R&D are $166 million, only 0.3 percent of the
total portfolio.
- DOE R&D earmarks would hit a new record of $318 million in Senate
appropriations, and would total $167 million in the House. The Office
of Science (OS) budget contains $35 million (House) to $49 million (Senate)
in R&D earmarks; because there is little overlap, both sets of earmarks
could wind up in the final budget. All of these earmarks are in the
Biological and Environmental Research (BER) program; the Senate’s 48
earmarks account for 10 percent of the BER budget and would leave core
BER R&D programs with declining funding even as overall OS R&D
would increase slightly. In DOE’s energy R&D, the Senate would earmark $202 million
for projects, making up 15 percent of the portfolio.
- Some agencies remain earmark-free. The National Science Foundation (NSF), the National Institutes of Health (NIH), and the new Department of Homeland Security (DHS)
all remain earmark-free so far in the FY 2006 appropriations process.
Traditionally, NIH and NSF’s research accounts have been free of earmarks,
although in some years NSF construction projects are earmarked. FY 2006
is only the third year of appropriations for DHS; so far, Congress has
not earmarked R&D projects in DHS, although earmarks do appear in
other parts of the DHS budget.
- Congress has
finalized the budgets of two agencies. The FY 2006 Environmental
Protection Agency (EPA) budget contains $33 million in earmarked
R&D projects, down significantly from previous years to allow most
EPA core R&D programs increases. The final Department
of the Interior budget contains $12 million in earmarks, mostly
for projects in the U.S. Geological Survey, again down from previous
years because of extremely tight funding allocations in the Interior-Environment
bill.
Definitions: What is an R&D Earmark?
For the purposes
of this analysis, R&D earmarks are defined as “congressionally designated
performer-specific R&D projects not included in agency budget requests.”
The earmarks appear in either legislative language contained in appropriations
bills, in which case they have the force of law, or appear in committee
report language accompanying appropriations bills, in which case they
are technically advisory. For all practical purposes, however, agencies
usually follow the instructions from Congress contained in committee
report language, including earmarks. When Congress designates a specific
performer or performers for a particular R&D project, these are
counted as earmarks; because AAAS definitions of R&D include investments
in R&D facilities construction, the earmarks in this analysis also
include funds provided to specific institutions for investments in R&D
major capital equipment, and also construction funds for specific R&D
facilities.
R&D earmarks do not appear in
federal agencies’ budget requests, which are released at the beginning of the
budget process in February and reflect agency priorities, but are added to
budgets by Congress during the appropriations process. Some projects not
originally included in agency requests may be initiated by congressional action
in earlier appropriations cycles and may be renewed at reduced funding levels
in agencies’ requests; funds added to specific performers by Congress above the
amounts requested by the agency are counted as earmarks.
These figures include
earmarks to all categories of R&D performers. While discussion of
the earmarks issue tends to center on earmarks to academic institutions,
this analysis also includes R&D earmarks to other categories of
performers, most prominently federal laboratories. While academic institutions
receive the bulk of the earmarks in Table A, federal laboratories, nonprofits,
and companies also receive earmarks.
The earmarks counted
in this analysis are a subset of R&D in the federal budget as tracked
by AAAS. Thus, the earmarks in this analysis do not include non-R&D
projects that may go to R&D performers, for example educational
or extension projects awarded to universities and colleges. Some of
these earmarks may come from the same budget accounts that fund R&D
earmarks.
Purpose of the AAAS Analysis
The analysis is
intended to provide timely and unbiased information for further analysis
and debate on the allocation of R&D resources in the federal budget
process for policymakers and members of the science and engineering
community who are concerned about methods of allocating R&D resources.
It attempts to provide additional information to supplement existing
AAAS coverage of R&D in the appropriations process.
The analysis is not a comprehensive inventory of earmarks; nor
can the analysis break out earmarks by recipient or by state because
of the difficulty in identifying and assigning locations to multi-performer
research consortia or earmarks in which the actual performer is left
intentionally vague. Also, because earmarks are somewhat in the eye
of the beholder and are ill-defined (unlike the standardized, longstanding
definitions for R&D used by AAAS and federal agencies) this analysis
necessarily relies on AAAS interpretations and judgment calls on a project-by-project
basis of what is or is not an R&D earmark. This analysis does not
take a position on the relative merits of agency requests vs. congressional
earmarks, or of competitively awarded funds vs. earmarked funds.
Conclusions
As of the August
recess, it is difficult to see where the FY 2006 appropriations process
is headed. House and Senate appropriators are far apart on the budgets
of key R&D funding agencies, not just in spending totals but also
in earmarks. In some years, appropriators have added House and Senate
earmarks together; in others, they have added earmarks but have chiseled
the size of individual earmarks; in still others, they have had to pick
and choose House and Senate priorities to meet tight targets. So far
in USGS and EPA final FY 2006 budgets they appear to have done the latter,
but there is no guarantee they will continue to do so in the fall because
each appropriations bill has its own dynamic, with different negotiators
and different targets. With the fiscal situation on the nondefense side unlikely to get better in FY 2006 budget negotiations,
congressional appropriators will have to square constituent demands
for earmarked funds against core program funding, and will have to make
both fit under restrictive budget targets.
- August 10, 2005
AAAS R&D Budget and Policy Program
1200 New York Ave, NW
Washington, DC 20005
(202) 326-6607; -6600
science_policy@aaas.org
www.aaas.org/spp/rd
