Highlights
- The National Science
Foundation (NSF) budget, after declining in 2005, would barely increase by 1.1
percent to $5.5 billion next year in the latest Senate plan, falling short
of the $5.6 billion in the House and Administration proposals and even falling
short of the $5.6 billion NSF had last year.
- All of the FY
2006 proposals would fall far short of the $8.5 billion authorized by
law.
- While
the Senate would add $12 million to the request for Research and Related
Activities and $10 million for education programs, R&D facilities
construction funding would fall far short of the request. NSF’s total
R&D funding would increase just 1.6 percent to $4.1 billion
(see Table), falling short of the 2.0 percent
expected inflation rate.
- Most NSF research directorates would receive increases between 1 and 3
percent in 2006 in the Senate plan (see Table),
which would barely bring their budgets back to last year’s levels.
- Most of NSF’s
education and training programs would suffer steep cuts for the second
year in a row under the House, Senate, and Administration plans.
- The small increases for the research directorates would squeeze NSF funding
of competitively awarded research grants. NSF expects to make awards
to just one in five applications this year.
NSF R&D in FY 2006 Senate Appropriations
On June 23, the Senate Appropriations Committee approved
its version of the FY 2006 Commerce, Justice, and Science appropriations
bill (HR 2862), following full House approval of its version a week
earlier. The Senate bill would give NSF a total budget of $5.5 billion
in FY 2006, barely an increase of 1.1 percent or $58 million above this
year and below last year’s (2004) budget. 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 2006 Senate appropriation
would fall $3 billion short of the $8.5 billion authorized funding level
for FY 2006. Both the House and the Bush Administration request found
slightly more for NSF than the Senate with $5.6 billion. (For details
of R&D in the FY 2006 request, please see Chapter
7 of AAAS
Report XXX: R&D FY 2006 or the
February 28 AAAS R&D Funding Update. For
details of NSF R&D in House appropriations, see the June
14 R&D Funding Update.)
Because of an
extensive reorganization of appropriations bill jurisdictions, in FY
2006 the NSF and the National Aeronautics and
Space Administration (NASA) will be funded for the first time with
the Departments of Commerce and Justice. NSF
and NASA were formerly funded in the now defunct VA-HUD appropriations
bill alongside the Departments of Veterans Affairs and Housing and Urban
Development. As a result, the former Commerce, Justice, and State appropriations
bill in the House now has “Science” in its name. The Senate version
of the bill, however, has a different group of agencies: although Commerce,
Justice, NASA, and NSF are still funded together in the Senate, the
Senate bill excludes the Department of State. The differing jurisdictions
in the House and the Senate bills will make agreeing on a final (conference)
bill extremely difficult.
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 at a time when the federal
budget had just come from four years of surpluses, but with the return
of budget deficits NSF appropriations have fallen far short of authorized
amounts (see Figure 1). The gap widens in the FY 2006 Senate appropriation
to $3 billion, the distance between the $5.5 billion appropriation and
the $8.5 billion authorized level, putting the NSF doubling goal well
out of reach in these tough budgetary times.
Figure 1. (click
on the image for PDF)
NSF’s R&D funding, which excludes NSF’s education and training activities
and overhead costs, would total $4.1 billion in the Senate bill, an
increase of $66 million or 1.6 percent that would bring NSF R&D
funding back to the 2004 level after cuts in 2005 (see Table).
The House would provide a slightly larger 2.6 percent R&D increase.
In a sign of
the extremely tight constraints on discretionary spending that Congress
has agreed on, the Senate was able to add only $12 million to the request
for programs in the Research and Related Activities (R&RA)
account, which funds most of NSF’s R&D. R&RA funding would increase
$125 million or 3.0 percent over this year to $4.3 billion, which should
allow for increases between 1 and 3 percent for most of NSF’s research
directorates to bring funding just barely to 2004 levels after cuts
in 2005, with no allowance for 2 years of inflation (see Table).
Within the BIO directorate, the Senate would like NSF to provide
$100 million for the Plant Genome Research Program, up from $94 million
this year.
The largest
increase in R&RA would be a 12.4 percent boost to Polar Programs
to $387 million, but nearly all of the increase would fund a proposed
transfer of $48 million in non-R&D Coast Guard costs for icebreakers
to the NSF budget. Icebreaker ships necessary for research access to
the Arctic and Antarctic have traditionally been
funded by the Coast Guard, but in the FY 2006 budget request NSF would
take over funding for these ships. So far, both the House and the Senate
have agreed to this transfer in both the Coast Guard and NSF appropriations.
Many in the polar research community are concerned about the financial
implications of this transfer, partly for the extra costs in FY 2006
but mostly because of the far larger costs looming in the future to
renovate or replace these aging icebreakers within a tight NSF budget.
Although the budget envisions NSF paying the Coast Guard to keep operating
these icebreakers, both the House and the Senate would give NSF the
flexibility to make other arrangements if the Coast Guard is unable
to do so next year or in future years.
The Senate would join the House in trimming the request for Major Research
Equipment and Facilities Construction (MREFC) account, but would
still provide a $20 million boost over the current funding level. The
$193 million MREFC appropriation would be an 11.3 percent increase.
Both chambers have now agreed with the NSF proposal to have no new starts
in FY 2006, and would fund four out of the five existing projects. While
both Commerce-Justice-Science bills would provide funding close to the
request for the Scientific Ocean Drilling Vessel, the Atacama
Large Millimeter Array, EarthScope, and the
IceCube Neutrino Observatory projects, neither would fund
the Rare Symmetry Violating Processes (RSVP) project in protest over
escalating cost estimates for the project.
The Senate would
do little to reverse steep proposed cuts in NSF’s education programs.
NSF proposed an Education and Human Resources (EHR) budget
of just $737 million, down a dramatic $104 million from this year after
an identical cut in the 2005 budget. The House would add back $70 million
for a budget of $807 million, still 4.1 percent below FY 2005, but the
Senate’s $10 million addition would leave the EHR budget down 11 percent.
Although the Senate protests the Bush Administration’s efforts to transition
the Math and Science Partnerships (MSP) program from a joint Department
of Education-NSF program to an Education-only one, the Senate appropriation
would only provide $64 million for NSF’s MSP program, less than half
the $139 million NSF received last year. (The Senate has not yet acted
on the Education MSP program.) Only the Experimental Program to Stimulate
Competitive Research (EPSCoR) program would
increase in the Senate plan, to $100 million. 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. Other education programs would decline dramatically.
NSF Funding Mechanisms
The small increases for the research directorates in the Senate appropriation
would squeeze NSF funding of competitively awarded research grants.
The success rate for NSF research grant applications would be
21 percent in FY 2006 in the request, essentially unchanged from
2005 and 2004. The small boost over the request in the Senate R&RA
appropriation would do little to alter this projection. ENG expects
to fund only 18 percent of its research grant applications, while CISE
would fund 16 percent; both directorates’ success rates would be up
from just 15 percent last year and this year.
Next Steps and Possible Impacts
NSF has enjoyed
mostly steady budget growth over the past several decades, as shown
in Figure 2, but in recent times NSF’s budget has stagnated and even
declined. 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 budget over five years, culminating in the NSF authorization
bill of December 2002. But when the budget surplus years of 1998-2001
were followed by the current string of budget deficits, budget growth
slowed down to just ahead of the inflation rate in FY 2004 and reversed
with FY 2005 budget cuts. The FY 2006 Senate appropriation would fail
to keep pace with inflation, and would bring NSF R&D below the 2003
funding level in inflation-adjusted dollars. As noted earlier, these
smaller increases or cuts in recent years have put the NSF budget further
and further behind the authorized doubling path and have created downward
pressures on NSF grant sizes and success rates.
Figure 2. (click
on the image for PDF)
The Senate is expected to debate
and approve the Commerce, Justice, and Science appropriations bill in July. Because
the House-approved version of the bill includes the Department of State, which
the Senate would fund in another appropriations bill entirely, the House-Senate
conference to resolve differences is expected to extremely difficult and may
not conclude until the fall.
-
June 29, 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
