On October 9, already nine
days into fiscal year (FY) 2003, the House Appropriations Committee
finally drafted an FY 2003 VA-HUD appropriations bill that would provide
a substantial budget increase for the National Science Foundation (NSF).
The Senate drafted its version of the bill in July, but the full Senate
has not approved it yet. The House bill would provide NSF with a total
budget of $5.4 billion in FY 2003, $614 million or 12.8 percent more
than FY 2002. This would far exceed the Administration’s request of
$5.0 billion and would exceed the Senate’s allocation by $70 million.
In the House plan, NSF’s R&D funding would rise 14.5 percent
for a total of $4.0 billion, including a 15.3 percent boost in the key
Research and Related Activities account which could be the first year
of a five-year doubling effort (see Table).
The Senate would provide a slightly smaller
increase that would also be consistent with a five-year doubling track.
NSF’s budget has a long way to go before becoming final, however, and
until then the agency will have to operate at last year’s funding levels.
The House
FY 2003 VA-HUD bill would provide $91 billion for discretionary programs,
nearly the same as the Senate version of the bill. The bill funds science
agencies including NSF, the National Aeronautics
and Space Administration (NASA), the Environmental
Protection Agency (EPA), and non-R&D programs for veterans and
housing. The President requested $93 billion for the bill’s programs,
but both the House and the Senate would rearrange priorities to give
NSF far more money than requested. The House is able to provide even
more for NSF than the Senate, in part because of offsets in other parts
of the bill, including a controversial proposed elimination of the Corporation
for National and Community Service and proposed savings in several housing
programs.
In February,
NSF won praise from the Bush Administration for its management, but
only modest increases for its R&D programs. Excluding NSF’s non-R&D
education activities, NSF R&D would have totaled $3.7 billion, a
boost of 3.5 percent in which more than half of the increase would have
been due to the proposed transfer of three science programs from
other agencies. Without these transfers, NSF R&D would have increased
only 1.4 percent. Both the House
and the Senate would reject the proposed transfers of a toxic hydrology
program from the U.S. Geological Survey (USGS), the National Sea Grant
College Program from the Department of Commerce, and an environmental
education program from the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) and
would fund these programs in their current agencies (see the July
12 AAAS R&D Funding Update for Interior R&D; see the July
26 AAAS R&D Funding Update for Senate-proposed Commerce R&D;
and see the August 6 AAAS R&D Funding Update
for Senate-proposed EPA R&D). (For details of the request for NSF,
see Chapter 7 of AAAS Report XXVII: R&D
FY 2003).
The House
would award large increases to NSF’s budget and to NSF’s R&D: the
House VA-HUD bill would far exceed the request with $5.4 billion to
NSF, an increase of $614 million or 12.8 percent. NSF’s
R&D funding, which excludes NSF’s education and training activities
and overhead costs, would total $4.0 billion in the House plan, an increase
of 14.5 percent or $510 million (see Table).
This appropriation falls slightly short, but is mostly consistent with,
an NSF authorization bill (HR 4664) approved by the House in June that
would authorize the NSF budget on the first three years of a five-year
doubling trajectory. Work on the authorization bill remains stalled
while a Senate version awaits floor debate, but now both the House and the Senate have proposed appropriations for FY 2003
that would be consistent with the first year of a five-year doubling
plan.
The Research and Related Activities (R&RA) account, which funds most
of NSF’s R&D, would receive $4.2 billion, 15.3 percent or $551 million
more than FY 2002 in an increase consistent with a doubling trajectory
beginning in FY 2003. The House bill would offer 15 percent increases
to most of the R&RA research directorates; the Senate bill would
vary these increases. The big winner would be Integrated Activities,
which would receive $151 million for an increase of $44 million or 41.4
percent. The House would add $40 million to the request for the Major
Research Instrumentation program to bring funding to $94 million,
well above the $76 million FY 2002 total. This program provides funds
to address research equipment needs of research institutions, mostly
universities.
The Mathematical
and Physical Sciences directorate would receive $117 million more than
the request for a total of $1.1 billion (up 15.0 percent), within which
mathematical sciences would receive the request of $182 million (up
20.1 percent) and physics would receive a 15 percent increase to $225
million. The Geosciences directorate would receive a 15 percent boost
over FY 2002 for a total of $701 million, without the three proposed
transfers in the budget request.
The Major Research Equipment and Facilities Construction (MREFC) account,
which funds construction of large-scale scientific facilities, would
decline sharply in the Senate bill but would enjoy a 14.9 percent increase
to $160 million in the House bill. The Senate would provide only $79
million and would fund only five of the seven requested projects. The
House would fund six out of seven, and also fund two projects not in
the NSF request but funded in FY 2002. The House would fund the Atacama
Large Millimeter Array (ALMA) radio telescope ($30 million), the Large
Hadron Collider ($10 million), the Network for Earthquake Engineering
Simulation (NEES; $14 million), the South Pole Station ($6 million),
Earth Scope ($40 million, more than the $35 million request), and Terascale
Computing Systems ($10 million, less than the $20 million request).
The House would also provide $26 million for the High-performance Instrumented
Airborne Platform for Environmental Research (HIAPER; $35 million in
FY 2002) and $25 million for the IceCube Neutrino Detector Observatory
in Antarctica ($15 million in FY 2002), neither
of which was included in the NSF request. Neither the House nor the
Senate would fund the National Ecological Observatory Network (NEON),
requested at $12 million for FY 2003.
NSF’s Education and Human Resources programs would receive $911 million,
just 1.8 percent above FY 2002. The heart of the Administration’s request
was $200 million for the second year of a Math and Science Partnerships
program to encourage academic institutions and schools to work together
to improve math and science education. The House would trim the request
for the program to $160 million and spread the savings among other EHR
programs; the Senate would provide even less ($120 million).
The House would provide $91 million for the Experimental Program
to Stimulate Competitive Research (EPSCoR), the same as the FY 2002
level. EPSCOR assists research institutions and states that have traditionally
been underrepresented in federal R&D funding.
The House
VA-HUD bill is now ready for floor debate, but consideration will be
delayed until after the November elections. If the House does not approve
the VA-HUD bill by the end of the year, a new bill will have to be drafted
in the 108th Congress in 2003. The same is true for the Senate
version of the bill; although it was drafted in July, it will not make
it to the Senate floor before the November elections. Until a final
FY 2003 appropriations bill is signed into law, which may not be until
next year, all programs (including NSF programs) will operate at FY
2002 funding levels on a series of continuing resolutions (temporary
funding bills). NSF will have to wait to receive its proposed increases.
- October 10, 2002
AAAS R&D Budget and Policy Program
American Association for the Advancement of Science
1200 New York Ave, NW
Washington, DC 20005
(202) 326-6607
science_policy@aaas.org
http://www.aaas.org/spp/rd
(new URL)
