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EPA R&D in FY 2007 House Appropriations PDF
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The Environmental Protection Agency’s (EPA) R&D budget would increase
1.3 percent or $8 million to $608 million in the latest House appropriation, a
sharp turnaround from a 7 percent EPA-requested cut. Although much of the improvement would come
from $30 million in congressional earmarks, the House would also add funds to
clean air, human health, sustainability, and toxics research. - EPA’s overall budget would fall 0.7 percent to $7.6 billion because
of cuts to State and Tribal Assistance Grants.
EPA R&D in FY 2007 House Appropriations On
May 10, the House Appropriations Committee approved its version of the fiscal
year (FY) 2007 Interior and Environment appropriations bill (HR 5386) for expected
debate and approval by the full House this week. The bill funds most of the Department
of the Interior as well as the Smithsonian Institution, the Forest Service,
and the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA). EPA’s
R&D would total $608 million in the House Interor/Environment
bill, a small gain of $8 million or 1.3 percent that would be a dramatic improvement
over a 7 percent requested 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
XXXI: R&D FY 2007 or the
February 28 EPA R&D Funding Update.) EPA’s
R&D is managed by its Office of Research and Development (ORD), which funds
both R&D at EPA laboratories around the country and external R&D, mostly
at universities. Nearly all of EPA’s
R&D comes from the Science and Technology (S&T) budget account, which
would total $808 million in the FY 2007 House plan, a dramatic increase of 10.7
percent. But the big increase comes primarily from a transfer of many non-R&D
operating costs from the Environmental Programs and Management (EPM) account to
S&T. Taking out these costs and other non-R&D items such as critical infrastructure
protection, operating overhead costs, and clean air standards and certification
activities leaves R&D in the Science and Technology account at $576 million
in the House, a gain of 1.4 percent in contrast to a requested cut. ORD also receives
R&D funding from the Superfund program (down $3 million to $30 million) for
hazardous wastes research, and small amounts of funding from other EPA accounts. EPA
proposed to eliminate congressional earmarks in the FY 2007 request, but they
make a comeback in the House appropriation to the tune of $30 million, down slightly
from $33 million in 2006. The congressionally designated, performer-specific projects
make up $30 million of the $50 million in added R&D funds. The remaining $20
million would go to boost EPA R&D efforts in several key areas. The House
would sustain a proposed 10 percent boost for clean water research to $106 million.
Clean air research would stay even at $102 million in the House plan instead of
a requested cut; global change research would increase slightly to $19 million.
Human health and ecosystems research, the largest part of the ORD portfolio, would
also stay flat (at $238 million) instead of a requested cut, with increases in
the computational toxicology program offset by slight cuts in human health risk
assessment. Within this portfolio, the House would reject a nearly one-third reduction
in funding for fellowships down to $8 million, which could have discontinued support
for up to 37 fellows receiving EPA support for their environmental studies; instead,
the House would sustain funding at the current level of $12 million. The
House would trim $4 million from the request, but homeland security related R&D
would continue to be a growth area in the portfolio, rising from $23 million to
$30 million this year and up to $33 million in 2007. Some of this effort is devoted
to protecting drinking water supplies against terrorist attack through vulnerability
assessments and a laboratory network for surveillance. This portfolio also funds
EPA’s National Homeland Security Research Center (NHSRC) to conduct R&D on
a wide variety of terrorist threats that may have an impact on the natural environment,
such as radiation, drinking water contamination, and the environmental impacts
of cleanup technologies after a terrorist attack. 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
fares better than the overall FY 2007 House appropriation of $7.6 billion, a loss
of $53 million or 0.7 percent. The House would add $210 million to the request
for State and Tribal Assistance Grants, but program funding would still fall $140
million compared to this year. Most of this $3.0 billion program’s money goes
to state, local, and tribal governments to fund environmental projects, primarily
projects to preserve clean drinking water. The Environmental Programs and Management
(EPM) account that funds most of EPA’s regulatory work would remain flat at $2.3
billion. Impacts of the EPA R&D Portfolio EPA’s
R&D support has been declining slowly for the past few years after steady
growth in the late 1990s (see Figure 1). EPA R&D fell 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 hovered near
$600 million in today’s dollars in recent years. 
Figure 1. (click on the image for
PDF) 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. 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 (see Figure 2). 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.
 Figure
2. (click on the image for PDF) Outlook
and Next Steps The
full House will debate the Interior/Environmental bill this week, and will most
likely approve it by a large margin. The Senate version of the bill, however,
may not be drafted until July or later. (This analysis is one of a series
of AAAS R&D Funding Updates on FY 2007 congressional appropriations. The complete
series of AAAS R&D Funding Updates, including continually updated analyses
of R&D in FY 2007 appropriations, is available on the AAAS
R&D Web Site (http://www.aaas.org/spp/rd)
in the “FY 2007 R&D” or the “What’s
New” sections.)-
May 17, 2006
AAAS R&D Budget and Policy Program
1200 New York Avenue,
NW
Washington, DC 20005
(202) 326-6607
AAAS R&D Web site: http://www.aaas.org/spp/rd
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