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NSF R&D by Program in FY 2007 House Appropriations PDF
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FY 2007 NSF Budget AAAS Analysis
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| Highlights -
The House has endorsed the Bush Administration’s American Competitiveness Initiative
to boost physical sciences research with a 7.9 percent increase, as requested,
for the National Science Foundation (NSF) budget to $6.0 billion in FY 2007 (see
Table). The increase would benefit all disciplines
in NSF’s research portfolio. -
NSF R&D funding (excluding education, training, and overhead costs) would
surge 8.3 percent to $4.5 billion after several years of flat funding, to reach
an all-time high in real terms. -
Most research directorates would receive increases between 5 and 9 percent after
several years of flat or declining funding. All the research directorates would
increase average award sizes, numbers of research grants, and success rates for
research grant applications. -
The House would move funds around to give NSF’s Education and Human Resources
(E.H.R.) budget a 4.5 percent boost to $832 million in 2007, $16 million more
than the request. NSF R&D in FY 2007 House Appropriations On
June 20, the House Appropriations Committee approved its version of the FY 2007
Science, State, Justice, and Commerce appropriations bill (SSJC; HR 5672), sending
it to the House floor for debate and expected approval next week. The large bill,
the last of the 11 FY 2007 appropriations bills to be drafted in the House, is
a major funding source for federal R&D, combining funding for the National
Science Foundation (NSF), the National Aeronautics and Space
Administration (NASA), and the Department of Commerce.
The House would fully
endorse proposed increases for NSF as part of the American Competitiveness Initiative.
The House SSJC bill would provide $6.0 billion for NSF’s FY 2007 budget, the
same as the request and 7.9 percent more than this year (see Table).
Both NSF and Commerce are key parts of the President’s proposed “American Competitiveness
Initiative” (ACI) that was first previewed in his State of the Union address in
response to a growing wave of concern about the state of U.S.
innovation. The ACI proposes to double funding for three key physical sciences
agencies over the next decade, and the 2007 budget requests the first installment
of this ambitious plan. NSF and Commerce’s National Institute of Standards and
Technology (NIST) laboratories, both funded in the SSJC bill, are two of the three
favored agencies (the other is DOE’s Office of Science).
The House has now agreed to the proposed increases for all three ACI agencies.
The requested
and House increases would go not only to NSF’s investment in the physical sciences
but across the entire NSF research portfolio, which spans the entire range of
science and engineering disciplines. NSF is the third-largest federal sponsor
of physical sciences research, after DOE and NASA, but is among the top 3 federal
funding agencies for nearly every science and engineering discipline. NSF is the
second largest funding source for R&D at colleges and universities behind
only the NIH, and provides the majority of federal support for basic research
at colleges and universities in the social sciences, environmental sciences, non-medical
biology, mathematics, and computer sciences. For the physical sciences and engineering,
NSF funds more than 40 percent of all federally supported academic basic research.
Most of its funding is in the form of competitively awarded research grants or
competitively awarded research centers. NSF’s R&D funding, which excludes NSF’s education and training activities
and overhead costs (such as polar logistics and administrative salaries), would
total $4.5 billion in the House plan, the same as the request and a gain of $348
million or 8.3 percent that would bring the R&D total slightly above 2004
levels in inflation-adjusted terms to a new high (see Figure 1), after cuts in
2005 and 2006. 
Figure
1. (click on the image for PDF) NSF’s
main Research and Related Activities (R&RA) account, which funds nearly
all of NSF’s basic and applied research and contains NSF’s discipline-based research
directorates, would climb 7.7 percent to $4.7 billion in both the request and
now the House appropriation (see Table). Most research
directorates would receive increases between 5 and 9 percent after several years
of flat or declining funding (see Figure 2). There would be larger increases for
some key programs: the new Office of Cyberinfrastructure
(OCI), a recent spin-off from the Computer and Information Science and Engineering
(CISE) directorate, would see its funding climb 44 percent to $182 million. OCI
supports the procurement, development, and operation of state-of-the-art cyberinfrastructure
resources for the entire research community. The increase would go toward making
a petascale high-performance computing system available, and
toward new software and collaborative tools needed for researchers to take advantage
of high-performance computing. The Office of Polar Programs (OPP), which funds
polar research but also provides logistical support for research activities at
both poles and maintains the South Pole Station, would receive $438 million, a
boost of 12.5 percent. The OPP increase would go to ramp up research during the
International Polar Year (2007-2008) and for increased logistics costs to support
that research. OPP would also continue to fund icebreaker ships necessary for
research access to the Arctic and Antarctic; these had traditionally been funded
by the Coast Guard, but in 2006 NSF takes over funding and would pay the Coast
Guard $57 million (down $1 million) in 2007 while NSF contemplates how it can
meet its future icebreaking needs. 
Figure
2. (click on the image for PDF) Even
after the substantial 2007 increases, funding for several research directorates
would remain below 2004 levels in real terms because of budget cuts in 2005
and 2006 (see Figure 2). In real terms, funding for the Mathematical and Physical
Sciences (MPS), Geosciences (GEO), Biological Sciences (BIO), and the Social,
Behavioral and Economic Sciences (SBE) directorates would remain below 2004 funding
levels even if the 2007 increases are approved, while the CISE, Polar, and Engineering
(ENG) directorates would reach new highs. The
Major Research Equipment and Facilities Construction (MREFC) account would receive
a 24 percent or $46 million boost to $237 million in 2007. MREFC funds only the
construction of large scientific facilities; smaller facilities construction projects,
planning and design for future facilities, research instrumentation grants, and
facilities operations are funded in R&RA by the research directorates. From
funding just 4 projects in 2006, the MREFC increase would allow funding for 8
projects, two of them new starts. Construction of the Atacama
Large Millimeter Array (ALMA; an astronomy project), EarthScope
(earth sciences), IceCube (a neutrino observatory at
the South Pole), and the Scientific Ocean Drilling Vessel (SODV, for ocean research)
would continue in FY 2007, while the National Ecological Observatory Network (NEON),
a long-delayed ecological research project, would finally receive construction
funding in FY 2007 and the South Pole Station Modernization (SPSM) project would
resume in 2007 after a funding pause. The two new starts would be the Alaska Region
Research Vessel, a $56 million request to replace an aging arctic research vessel,
and the Ocean Observatories Initiative, a $14 million request to build an integrated
ocean observing network. The
House would add to a modest requested increase for NSF education and human resources
programs, but funding would still remain 18 percent below 2004 levels in real
terms. NSF proposed an Education and
Human Resources (EHR) budget of $816 million, but the House would add $16
million for a total of $832 million, a 4.5 percent increase over this year. But
since the EHR budget was $945 million as recently as 2004, the 2007 increase would
do little to reverse steep cuts in the past two years (see Figure 2). Much of
the fall is due to a shift in the Math and Science Partnerships (MSP) program
from a joint Department of Education (ED)-NSF program to a mostly Education-only
one. The NSF contribution was $139 million in 2004 but has declined steadily since
then and would decline further to just $46 million in the 2007 House appropriation,
while the ED program is now $182 million and would rise to $225 million in the
House Labor-HHS appropriations bill for a 2007 total of $271 million, 83 percent
of it in ED. The largest House addition to the request would be $11 million to
the Robert Noyce Scholarship Program to bring it to
$21 million. The Noyce program provides scholarships
to math and science undergraduate majors in return for a commitment to teaching.
The Experimental Program to Stimulate Competitive Research (EPSCoR)
would receive $105 million, up from $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 25 states, Puerto
Rico, and the U.S. Virgin Islands. NSF Funding Mechanisms The large House-endorsed increases for the research directorates would
begin to reverse recent declines in competitively awarded research grants. Looking only at competitively awarded research
grants, NSF’s core funding mechanism, NSF expects to fund 6,760 research grants
next year, a 9 percent increase over 2006, while at the same time increasing the
average award size to $148,300 (up 3.7 percent) after several years of flat funding.
After several years of declining success rates, NSF projects that it will fund
21 percent of research grant proposals, up slightly from 20 percent the last two
years. The broad-based increases would allow every research directorate to increase
the three key measures of the number of research grants, the average grant size,
and the projected success rate. The House SSJC bill would continue to emphasize congressional interest in
innovation inducement prizes as another method of distributing NSF funds. Report
language accompanying the bill encourages NSF to continue work on a congressional
directive in the final 2006 appropriation to craft a scientific prize competition
for high risk, high payoff research projects, with a possibility of a FY 2007
competition. Although innovation prizes have attracted a lot of attention in the
private sector, such as the X-Prize in aerospace, only DARPA in the Defense Department
has used it as a funding mechanism for federal R&D. Possible Impacts NSF
is the only federal agency with responsibility for research in all major science
and engineering fields. As shown in Figure 3, NSF has historically had 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.
In the past, NSF has distributed its budget 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, boosted even more in recent years with growth
in nanotechnology support. But the recent stagnation in NSF funding has resulted
in flat or falling support for all disciplines, as Figure 2 and Figure 3 make
clear. If the FY 2007 House and requested increases prevail, however, these trends
could begin to turn around. 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 80 percent of its R&D money 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. NSF operates no laboratories of
its own, but spends 8 percent of its R&D budget at federally funded R&D
centers (FFRDCs), government-owned but contractor-operated
laboratories including the National Corporation for Atmospheric Research (NCAR)
and the National Radio Astronomy Observatory (NRAO). Because
of the concentration of research-intensive universities in only a few states,
NSF spending is highly concentrated (see Figure 4). Seven states collectively
win a majority of NSF’s R&D funds. The NSF EPSCoR
program aims to help states that have traditionally received fewer NSF funds to
become more competitive in grant and center competitions. Collectively, the 25
NSF EPSCoR states (and Puerto Rico) received
11.4 percent of NSF’s R&D portfolio in FY 2003, far less than California
alone. 
Figure
3. (click on the image for PDF)  Figure
4. (click on the image for PDF) Outlook and Next Steps The
full House will debate and likely approve the Science-State-Commerce-Justice bill
next week. The Senate version of the bill, however, may not be drafted until July
or later; when it does, it is also likely to contain the ACI-driven increase for
NSF.
(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.)-
June 23, 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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