Highlights
- The Environmental Protection Agency’s (EPA) R&D budget would increase
slightly by 0.8 percent or $4 million to $577 million in FY 2006 in
the latest House plan (see Table). The
House would add $8 million to the President’s request, which called
for a slight cut in EPA R&D. The House plan would allow several
EPA R&D programs to receive increases.
- The House would
agree with the request to make Homeland
security-related R&D a winner in the R&D portfolio, with
large increases for decontamination research and drinking water security
research.
- EPA’s overall budget would fall 4.0 percent down to $7.7 billion because
of steep cuts to State and Tribal Assistance Grants proposed by the
Administration and agreed to by the House.
EPA R&D in FY 2006 House Appropriations
On May
19, the House of Representatives approved its version of the FY 2006
Interior and Environment appropriations bill (HR 2361), the second of
12 appropriations bills to win House approval. The bill funds most of
the Department of the Interior as well as the
Smithsonian Institution, the Forest Service, and for the first time
the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA). In previous years, EPA had
been funded along with the National Science Foundation, NASA, and the
Department of Veterans Affairs in the now-eliminated VA-HUD appropriations
bill. EPA’s R&D, mostly funded in the Science and Technology account, would
total $577 million in the House Interior/Environment bill, a modest
gain of $4 million or 0.8 percent (see Table)
compared to a small cut in the President’s February budget proposal.
(For details of the President’s request for EPA R&D, please
see Chapter 13 of AAAS Report XXX: R&D
FY 2006 or the March 2 EPA R&D
Funding Update).
EPA’s R&D
is mostly funded in the Science
and Technology (S&T) account. R&D in the S&T account
totals $544 million in the FY 2006 House plan, a 1.8 percent increase,
but a larger increase if congressionally designated performer-specific
R&D earmarks are not counted. While the House would add $40 million
in earmarks to the request, this would be less than the more than $60
million in FY 2005 earmarks, leaving more room for core R&D program
funding. The House appropriation would allow for some modest program
increases, such as clean air research from $101 million this year to
$108 million next year. Clean air research includes research on global
change, particulate matter, and tropospheric
ozone. Clean water research would increase from $94 million to $102
million. There would be a small increase in the computation toxicology
program from $12 million to $13 million. Most other EPA research areas
would see flat funding, except for sustainability research which would
fall from $40 million to $29 million as requested.
Homeland security-related R&D would be a winner in the R&D portfolio,
nearly doubling from $33 million in FY 2005 to $51 million next year
in the House plan, though less than the $94 million request (AAAS estimates
based on OMB data). EPA efforts would be focused in two areas. Drinking
water security research would be one priority, and would involve EPA
efforts to develop better surveillance and laboratory networks for drinking
water supplies to counter potential terrorist threats. The other priority
would be decontamination research, to develop better technologies and
methods for decontaminating terrorist attack sites such as the Senate
office buildings that EPA decontaminated from anthrax in 2001. EPA would
also continue threat and consequence assessments and testing potential
biodefense and other decontamination technologies.
Much of this work would be conducted at EPA’s National Homeland Security
Research Center (NHSRC) in Cincinnati.
EPA’s S&T
investments are a small part of the overall EPA portfolio (see Table),
and are designed to support EPA’s regulatory and enforcement missions.
R&D would fare better than the overall FY 2006 budget of $7.7 billion,
a loss of $318 million or 4.0 percent. The House would provide only
$3.1 billion for State and Tribal Assistance Grants (STG), down from $3.6 billion. Most of this money goes to state, local,
and tribal governments to fund environmental projects, primarily projects
to preserve clean drinking water. Most other EPA accounts would receive
increases, including the Environmental Programs and Management (EPM)
account that funds most of EPA’s regulatory work (up 4.2 percent to
$2.4 billion).
Impacts of the EPA R&D Portfolio
EPA’s basic and
applied research support (excluding development and R&D facilities)
comprises the large majority (80 percent) of EPA’s R&D. The largest
part of EPA’s research is in the life sciences (primarily biology and
environmental biology), with significant support for the environmental
sciences and engineering as well. Although EPA is the major environmental
regulatory agency in the federal government, many other agencies have
environmental responsibilities related to research, resource stewardship,
and economic management of the environment, so EPA is a relatively small
funding source for environmental R&D. In the environmental sciences,
EPA accounts for only 4 percent of total federal support, while in the
life sciences EPA funds less than 1 percent.
Figure 1. (click
on the image for PDF)
Roughly 47 percent of EPA’s
R&D is performed in the agency’s own laboratories, while about 10 percent
is performed by industrial firms. Nearly a third of EPA’s R&D is performed
by colleges and universities, a share that has been growing in recent years as
EPA has attempted to expand its links with academia. The remainder is performed
by nonprofit institutions and state and local governments.
EPA’s R&D support
has been declining slowly for the past few years after steady growth
in the late 1990s. EPA’s R&D budget declined sharply after FY 1994
and bottomed out in FY 1996 (see Figure 1). In subsequent years, EPA’s
R&D grew until FY 1999. EPA R&D declined again in FY 2000, and
has eroded slowly in inflation-adjusted dollars since then except for
a one-time boost in FY 2004 for homeland security-related R&D. EPA
R&D has essentially stayed at $600 million in today’s dollars for
more than a decade, a trend that the House appropriation would reinforce.
The Senate Appropriations
Committee is expected to draft its version of the Interior and Environment
bill in June.
-
June 3, 2005
(This analysis is one of a series of AAAS R&D Funding
Updates on FY 2006 congressional appropriations. The complete series
of AAAS R&D Funding Updates, including continually updated analyses
of R&D 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.)
AAAS R&D Budget and Policy Program
1200 New York Ave, NW
Washington, DC 20005
(202) 326-6607; -6600
AAAS R&D
Web site: www.aaas.org/spp/rd
