Highlights
- Unlike
the House, the Senate would cut the Environmental Protection Agency’s
(EPA) R&D budget by $20 million or 3.5 percent in its latest budget
plan (see Table). The House would provide
a modest increase. The Senate proposal would lead to cuts in many EPA
R&D programs.
- Both
the House and the Senate would agree with EPA’s plan to boost homeland
security-related R&D, with increases for decontamination research
and drinking water security research.
- EPA’s overall budget would fall 1.8 percent down to $7.9 billion because
of steep cuts to State and Tribal Assistance Grants proposed by the
Administration and agreed to by both the House and Senate.
EPA R&D in FY 2006 Senate Appropriations
On June
9, the Senate Appropriations Committee kicked off its FY 2006 appropriations
process by debating and approving its version of the FY 2006 Interior
and Environment appropriations bill (HR 2361), the first of 12 appropriations
bills. 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. On May 19, the full House
of Representatives approved its own version of the bill. EPA’s R&D, mostly funded in the Science and Technology account, would total $552 million in the Senate
Interior/Environment bill, a cut of $20 million or 3.5 percent that
contrasts to a modest increase in the House version of the bill. EPA
itself requested a small cut in its R&D portfolio in February. (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. For
details of the House EPA appropriation, see the June
3 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 $520 million in the FY 2006 Senate plan,
$24 million below what the House appropriated last month and well below
both this year’s funding level and the EPA request. Complicating matters,
the Senate would add $50 million in congressionally designated performer-specific
R&D earmarks to the request, more than the $40 million in projects
in the House bill. Although this would be less than the roughly $60
million in FY 2005 earmarks, the overall Senate cuts would leave many
core R&D programs below this year’s funding levels. Clean air research
would decline slightly to $101 million, compared to a modest increase
in the House bill. Clean air research includes research on global change,
particulate matter, and tropospheric ozone.
Clean water research would also decline, from $94 million to $92 million.
The computational toxicology program would remain at $12 million, while
the sustainability research program would fall from $40 million to $29
million as requested in both the House and Senate bills. Most other
EPA research areas would see flat funding.
The Senate would find room, however, for increases in EPA’s homeland security-related
R&D, from $33 million in FY 2005 to $40 million next year. The
House and the EPA request would go even higher. 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.
In a tight budget environment, the Senate would provide $7.9 billion
for the EPA budget, a loss of $144 million or 1.8 percent. The Senate
would provide $3.4 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 modest increases, including the Environmental
Programs and Management (EPM) account that funds most of EPA’s regulatory
work (up 1.7 percent to $2.3 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.
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. 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 both the House and Senate appropriations would
reinforce, although the Senate appropriation would mean a nearly 6 percent
cut after adjusting for expected inflation.
The Interior/Environment
bill now goes to the full Senate for expected approval. After that,
a conference committee will negotiate a final Interior/Environment bill.
Given the many competing priorities in the bill and the many differences
between House and Senate appropriations, it is unclear how EPA R&D
will fare in conference or when the final bill will be ready.
-
June 17, 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
