(This analysis is a preview of the NSF chapter in the forthcoming
AAAS Report XXIX: Research and Development
FY 2005, a comprehensive look at the President’s budget for R&D
in FY 2005. This analysis contains revised AAAS estimates of NSF R&D,
different from figures presented in the AAAS Preliminary
Analysis of February 5. More tables and continually updated supplemental
materials on R&D in the FY 2005 budget can be found on the AAAS R&D
Web site at http://www.aaas.org/spp/rd.)
Highlights
- Within the total National
Science Foundation (NSF) budget, up 3.0 percent to $5.7 billion in FY
2005, most research directorates would receive increases
of about 2 percent (see Table II-7).
- The NSF budget
of $5.7 billion would be far short of the $7.4 billion FY 2005 authorization
signed into law a year ago as part of a plan to double the NSF budget
in the five years to FY 2007. The Bush Administration’s budget plans
assume a $5.6 billion NSF budget in FY 2007, $4.2 billion short of the
$9.8 billion authorized for that year.
- NSF’s R&D funding would total $4.2 billion in FY 2005, an increase
of $149 million or 3.6 percent (see Table
II-7).
- The Major Research
Equipment and Facilities Construction (MREFC) account would enjoy a
sizeable increase, going from $155 million to $213 million because of
three proposed starts (the National Ecological Observatory Network,
an ocean-drilling project, and Rare Symmetry Violating Processes).
- The request proposes to move funding for the Math and Science Partnerships from Education and Human Resources (E.H.R)
to the Research and Related Activities (R&RA) account, and cut its
funding from $140 million down to $80 million.
- The small increases for the research directorates would squeeze NSF funding
of competitively awarded research grants. The total number of NSF
research grants would fall by 72 down to 6,145 in FY 2005, and the competition
for them would get harder. NSF expects to make awards to less than one
in four applications this year. Even successful applicants may be disappointed:
the average size of an NSF research grant would rise only 2.2 percent
in FY 2005, barely above the expected rate of inflation.
Overview of the NSF Budget
The FY 2005 budget request of $5.7 billion for NSF would be a $167 million
(or 3.0 percent) increase over this year’s budget (see Table
II-7). The FY 2004 budget was only signed into law at the end of
January; until then, NSF had been operating at FY 2003 funding levels
since October 1.
An NSF authorization
bill calling for a doubling of the NSF budget between FY 2002 and FY
2007 was signed into law in December 2002, but the FY 2004 appropriation
fell $1 billion short of the authorized $6.6 billion funding level for
FY 2004. The gap widens in the FY 2005 budget to $1.6 billion, the distance between
the $5.7 billion Administration request and the $7.4 billion authorized
level, putting the NSF doubling goal well out of reach in these tough
budgetary times. By FY 2007, the envisioned conclusion of the doubling
campaign with an authorized NSF budget of $9.8 billion, the Bush budget
plan projects an NSF budget of only $5.6 billion, below even the FY
2005 budget and $4.2 billion short of the $9.8 billion authorized for
that year.
NSF’s R&D funding, which excludes NSF’s education and training activities
and overhead costs, would total $4.2 billion, an increase of 3.6 percent
or $149 million (see Table II-7).
The Research and Related Activities (R&RA) account, which funds most
of NSF’s R&D, would receive $4.5 billion, 4.7 percent or $201 million
more than FY 2004. The research
directorates would receive increases of about 2 percent, except
for Social, Behavioral, and Economic (SBE) Sciences with a proposed
increase of 10.3 percent. The Mathematical and Physical Sciences (MPS),
Biological Sciences (BIO), Computer and Information Science and Engineering
(CISE) and Geosciences (GEO) directorates would all increase by 2.2
percent in FY 2005.
The Integrative
Activities (IA) account within R&RA would jump to $240 million,
an increase of $96 million, but $80 million would be due to the proposed
transfer of the Math and Science Partnerships from Education
and Human Resources (E.H.R) to IA, along with a proposed cut in its
funding from $139 million down to $80 million. The MSP program,
run jointly by NSF and the Department of Education, encourages academic
institutions and schools to work together to improve math and science
education. The FY 2005 budget requests $269 million for the $150 million
fthe Department of Education’s (ED) share
of the program, up dramatically from $149 million this year. Combined,
the MSP programs would receive $349 million in FY 2005, up from $288
million this year, and would reflect the Bush Administration’s desire
to shift the emphasis of the program toward ED. Elsewhere in the IA
account, funding for the Major Research Instrumentation (MRI) program
would fall from $109 million down to $90 million. The MRI program awards
competitive grants to universities and colleges to purchase scientific
and engineering equipment and instrumentation to be used for research
and training; in response to congressional concerns, at least $25 million
of the funding would go toward minority-serving institutions. Also in
IA, Science of Learning Centers is a relatively new program for learning
research across disciplines, with $20 million this year and the same
amount next year, both ten times the initial $2 million investment last
year.
Within a relatively
tight budget, there would be little room for larger increases. NSF participation in the Nanoscale Science and
Engineering Initiative, however, would buck the trend with a 20 percent
increase to $305 million across the directorates, with major funding
for this initiative split between Engineering (ENG) and MPS. NSF priorities
in this multi-agency initiative with a $982 million budget across 10
agencies would include nanobiotechnology,
nanoscale manufacturing, and instrumentation,
focused on the NSF specialties of long-term fundamental research, research
infrastructure, and interdisciplinary centers. Overall NSF participation
in another multi-agency initiative, Networking and Information Technology
R&D (NITRD), would barely increase to $761 million. Most of NSF’s
part of the seven-agency NITRD investment would take place in the CISE
directorate, proposed for only a 2.2 percent gain to $618 million.
NSF’s Education and Human Resources (EHR) programs would receive $771 million,
down a dramatic $168 million from this year. Most of the decline is
due to the shift of the Math
and Science Partnerships (MSP) program to R&RA. The FY 2005
budget contains $84 million for the Experimental Program to Stimulate
Competitive Research (EPSCoR), $10 million less than this year. EPSCOR assists research
institutions and states that have traditionally been underrepresented
in federal R&D funding to build research capacity. The program is
currently open to 24 states, Puerto Rico, and
the U.S. Virgin Islands.
NSF Funding Mechanisms
The small increases for the research directorates would squeeze NSF funding
of competitively awarded research grants. The success rate for NSF research grant applications
would dip to 23 percent in FY 2005, down one percentage point from
the past few years. Among some directorates, the odds of success would
be even lower. ENG expects to fund only 15 percent of its research grant
applications, while BIO would fund less than one in five (19 percent),
both down one percentage point from this year and two points from last
year.
Although the
number of research grants awarded has been on a steady upward trend
in recent years, NSF expects to fund only 6,145 research grants
in FY 2005, down by 72 from this year’s expected total. Again, BIO
and ENG expect large declines, with BIO funding 2.6 percent fewer grants
and EMG funding 3.7 percent fewer. The MPS directorate expects to fund
1,610 research grants in FY 2005, 40 fewer than this year.
For successful
applicants, the good news is that NSF has made it a high priority to
increase the average duration of a research grant. From an NSF-wide
average of 2.9 years last year, the average grant would be 3.0 years
this year and next year, with similar trends in all the research directorates.
The bad news
for successful applicants, however, is that many research grant awards
would fail to keep pace with inflation. The
2.2 percent average increase for NSF research grants between FY 2004
and FY 2005 to $142,000 would be just ahead of the 1.3 percent expected
rate of inflation for the economy as a whole, but several directorates
would fail to keep pace. The average ENG ($119,500) and GEO ($147,900)
research grant would not increase at all, and the average CISE grant
($165,000) would increase just 0.9 percent. The NSF-wide increase would
be skewed by a 5.0 percent increase in the average BIO research grant
to $190,750.
On the other
hand, NSF funding of research centers would continue to be a growth
area in FY 2005 for a total of $457 million in FY 2005, up 10.7 percent
from this year across most of NSF’s funding areas. These multi-year
multidisciplinary commitments of funds, mostly to universities, have
grown in importance within NSF budget over the past decade and would
hit an all-time high of nearly 11 percent of the R&D portfolio in
FY 2005.
NSF would also expand its support of R&D facilities, for a total of
$686 million in FY 2005, an increase of 18.2 percent. There would
be $213 million for the Major
Research Equipment and Facilities Construction (MREFC) account,
up dramatically from $155 million this year. There would be three proposed
starts (the National Ecological Observatory Network (NEON), the Scientific
Ocean Drilling Vessel, and Rare Symmetry Violating Processes (RSVP)),
with NEON a holdover from past requests that has yet to be funded by
Congress. Two more projects (Ocean Observatories Initiative and the
Alaska Region Research Vessel) are queued up for FY 2006 starts. The
National Earthquake Engineering and Simulation project, the South Pole
Station, and Terascale Computing Systems finish
this year so no funds would be necessary in FY 2005. The MREFC appropriation
only pays for the construction of major R&D facilities; the $686
million total facilities investment takes in design and development
of future facilities and operational costs of existing user facilities,
which are open to the general scientific and engineering community for
research. Outside the MREFC, the largest part of the facilities investment
would be $90 million for the Partnership for Advanced Computational
Infrastructure (PACI) to create a national cyberinfrastructure
designed to be an integrated system of state-of-the-art computing, communications,
and information resources for research and education.
NSF Research Portfolio and Performers
NSF is the only federal agency with responsibility for
research in all major science and engineering fields. As shown in Figure
1, NSF has a balanced research
portfolio covering the breadth of science and engineering. In most
fields, NSF is the largest or second-largest source of federal funding.
The evenly distributed
FY 2005 increase should benefit NSF support for most science and engineering
disciplines. In the past, NSF has distributed its increases unevenly
depending on then-current research priorities. In particular, NSF support
for computer sciences research has increased dramatically over the past
decade, as fundamental IT research has grown as a national priority.
NSF support of engineering research has also grown substantially over
the last decade. But in many disciplines, NSF support is only now recovering
from the lean years of the mid-1990s when NSF support for the physical
sciences, environmental sciences, the non-medical life sciences, and
mathematics actually fell. The FY 2005 budget should at least maintain
NSF support for all these disciplines at about the rate of inflation.
Figure 1. (click
on the image to view or download a color, full-size PDF version of the
chart)
NSF’s longstanding leadership
role in federal support of basic research continues to have a big impact on the
nation’s colleges and universities. NSF sends 81 percent of its R&D support
to colleges and universities, by far the highest ratio of any R&D funding
agency. NSF is the second-largest federal supporter of academic R&D, behind
the NIH, and dominates federal support in most non-biomedical fields.
Outlook and Historical Trends
NSF has enjoyed mostly steady budget growth over
the past several decades, as shown in Figure 2. After declines in the
mid-1990s in the push toward a balanced budget, growth resumed after
FY 1998 and momentum began to build to double the NSF budget over five
years, culminating in the NSF authorization bill of December 2002. But
NSF budget growth slowed down to just ahead of the inflation rate in
FY 2004, and would slow down further in FY 2005. As noted earlier, these
smaller increases put the NSF budget further and further behind the
authorized doubling path and have created downward pressures on NSF
grant sizes and success rates. While there is strong political pressure
for Congress to approve a budget more consistent with the authorized
funding track, lawmakers have been stymied by tight restraints on overall
domestic discretionary spending. In FY 2005, with overall domestic spending
proposed to increase by just 0.5 percent, the restraints will be even
tighter. If Congress agrees to these overall funding levels or even
goes lower, then any increases for NSF above the request would have
to be offset by cuts in other programs.
Figure 2. (click
on the image to view or download a color, full-size PDF version of the
chart)
Even the modest proposed increase for next year, however, looks good
compared to what may lie in store. With Congress and the President
apparently committed to reducing the budget deficit in half within the next
five years primarily through holding down domestic spending, the consequences
for NSF are becoming clearer. The FY 2005 budget contains preliminary
projections for the NSF budget out to FY 2009. In FY 2006, the NSF budget would fall to $5.6 billion, giving back
even the modest increase for next year, and increase to only $5.7 billion in FY
2009, still below the FY 2005 budget. After
adjusting for expected inflation, the five-year Bush budget would leave NSF’s
R&D investments 5 percent below
this year’s funding level in 2009.
- February 26, 2004
AAAS R&D Budget and Policy Program
1200 New York Ave, NW
Washington, DC 20005
(202) 326-6607; -6600
www.aaas.org/spp/rd
