Highlights
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House appropriators would endorse the Bush Administration’s requested increase
for the National Science Foundation (NSF) and would add to it for education programs.
The House would give NSF $6.5 billion for its budget in 2008, a 10.0 percent increase
(see Table). Most research directorates would
receive increases between 4 and 9 percent for the second year in a row.
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NSF R&D investments (excluding education, training, and overhead costs) would
total $4.9 billion in the House, matching the request for an 8.7 percent increase
to an all-time high in real terms.
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All the research directorates would be able to increase average award sizes, numbers
of research grants, and success rates for research grant applications in 2008.
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NSF’s Education and Human Resources (E.H.R.) budget, after years of steep budget
cuts, would soar 17.8 percent in the House appropriation to $823 million in 2008.
NSF R&D in FY 2008 House Appropriations
On July 12, the House Appropriations
Committee approved its version of the FY 2008 Commerce-Justice-Science appropriations
bill (HR 3093) providing funding for the National Science Foundation (NSF), the
National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA),
and the Department of Commerce. The full House is expected
to debate and approve the bill by the end of July. The Senate Appropriations Committee
has drafted its own version (S 1745). The House bill contains nearly $54 billion in
2008 discretionary spending for its programs, $3.2 billion more than the current
year and $2.3 billion more than the President’s request. Included in the bill is an appropriation of
$6.5 billion for NSF, $80 million more than a large requested increase and a full
$593 million or 10.0 percent more than the current year funding level (see Table). The
Senate would provide even more, for a total of $6.6 billion.
Over
a year ago, President Bush announced in his FY 2007 budget a proposal to substantially
increase funding for key physical sciences research agencies over ten years as
part of an “American Competitiveness Initiative” (ACI), designed in part to address
a growing wave of concern about the state of U.S.
innovation. The National Science Foundation (NSF) was one of three ACI agencies
(the others are the DOE Office of Science, and the National Institute of Standards
and Technology laboratories) selected for a ten-year doubling trajectory in the
Administration plan. The FY 2008 NSF budget, released in February, builds on congressional
approval of most of NSF’s 2007 increase with a second year of increases. The House
would add significantly to NSF’s request for education and human resources programs
to bring the total NSF budget to $6.5 billion, $593 million or 10.0 percent more
than the final 2007 funding level (see Table). The
increases would go to NSF’s entire range of science and engineering disciplines.
(For more on the 2008 request for NSF, see Chapter 6
of AAAS Report XXXII: R&D FY 2008 or the
February 21 AAAS R&D Funding Update. For details
of Senate appropriations for NSF, see the July 3 R&D
Funding Update.)
After
adjusting for inflation, the 2008 increase in both the NSF request and now the
House appropriation would enable NSF funding to narrowly reach an all-time high
(see Figure 1). After peaking in 2004, NSF funding fell in 2005 and 2006 but would
rise for the second year in a row in 2008.
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 $4.9 billion, a gain of $388 million
or 8.7 percent in the House 2008 appropriation that would bring the R&D total
slightly above 2004 in inflation-adjusted terms (see Figure 1), after cuts in
2005 and 2006 and a rebound in 2007. The Senate would provide $18 million more
than the House for an even larger R&D increase.
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 7.9 percent to $5.1
billion in the House bill (see Table). Most research directorates would receive
increases between 4 and 9 percent for the second year in a row after several years
of flat or declining funding (see Figure 2). The House would agree to large requested
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 9.6 percent to $200 million. OCI supports
the procurement, development, and operation of state-of-the-art cyberinfrastructure
resources for the entire research community. Its sister CISE directorate would
gain 9.0 percent. OCI and CISE would take the lead in a new Cyber-enabled Discovery
and Innovation (CDI) initiative to develop computationally based concepts and
tools to deal with complex systems. The Mathematical and Physical Sciences (MPS)
and Engineering (ENG), strong supporters along with CISE and OCI of the physical
sciences, would gain 8.9 percent and 8.7 percent, respectively. Moving away from
the physical sciences, the gains become smaller, dropping to 6.3 percent for the
Geosciences (GEO) directorate (to $792 million) down to modest increases for the
Biological Sciences (BIO) directorate (up 4.1 percent) and Social, Behavioral,
and Economic Sciences (SBE; up 3.9 percent). The Senate’s bill would offer similar
increases to the directorates.
Within
R&RA, the Integrative Activities (IA) account would climb 18.0 percent to
$271 million, primarily from a $24 million or 27.2 percent increase in Major Research
Instrumentation (MRI), a program to distribute competitively awarded instrumentation
grants to institutions for state-of-the-art research instrumentation that would
be too costly to be funded through regular NSF research awards. The Experimental
Program to Stimulate Competitive Research (EPSCoR) would move to IA and receive
$115 million, $8 million more than the request. 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; collectively, the EPSCoR states
received just 10.4 percent of NSF R&D funds in FY 2004.
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 the requested $465 million, a boost of 6.1 percent. The OPP increase
would build on a larger increase in 2007 to ramp up research during the International
Polar Year (2007-2008) and for increased logistics costs to support that research.
Away from the poles, NSF would invest a new $17 million in oceans research in
GEO to address important issues in ocean research identified recently by a multi-agency
Ocean Research Priorities Plan.
The
House would encourage NSF to create a new $10 million program devoted to ‘transformative
research,’ or research that is revolutionary and on the cutting edge. Although
language accompanying the House bill notes that much of NSF’s research portfolio
could be considered transformative, the House nevertheless encourages NSF to create
a program specifically devoted to this type of research.
Figure 2. (click on the image for
PDF)
Even
after the substantial 2007 and 2008 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 Geosciences (GEO) and
Biological Sciences (BIO) would remain below 2004 levels, while the computer sciences,
social sciences, mathematics and physical sciences, polar, and engineering directorates
would reach new highs, though just narrowly.
In
the House appropriation, the Major Research Equipment and Facilities Construction
(MREFC) account would receive the requested $54 million boost to $245 million
in 2008 to fund 7 projects (see Table). MREFC funds
only the construction of large scientific facilities; smaller facilities projects,
planning and design for future facilities, research instrumentation grants, and
facilities operations are funded in R&RA by the research directorates. Although
final plans for 2007 have not been announced, NSF will try to initiate three projects
in 2007 (the Ocean Observatories Initiative, the National Ecological Observatory
Network, and the Alaska Region Research Vessel) if sufficient funds are available.
In 2008, NSF would start the Advanced Laser Interferometer Gravitational Wave
Observatory (AdvLIGO), an upgrade to the existing LIGO in Washington
and West Virginia of the world’s
most sophisticated optical interferometers, with a $33 million allocation.
The
House would add money to an already-substantial requested increase for NSF education
and human resources programs to bring funding to $823 million, $124 million or
17.8 percent more than the current year, but still 19 percent below 2004 levels in real
terms after steep cuts in 2005 and 2006 and flat funding in 2007 (see Figure
2). In a reversal of past budgets, NSF would sustain the Math and Science Partnerships
(MSP) program as a joint Department of Education (ED)-NSF program after seeking
to transition the program to an Education-only one in previous years. The NSF
contribution was $139 million in 2004 but has declined steadily since then and
declined further to just $46 million in 2007; the 2008 request would stay at $46
million, but the House would provide $66 million, which could allow $50 million
for new grants. The ED portion of the program remains at $182 million in 2008.
The large education appropriation should allow most programs to expand in 2008,
with particular attention to the new Robert Noyce Scholarship program ($46 million)
and $10 million to create a new program for educators to train them in earth observations
and in using earth observation data on climate change.
NSF Funding Mechanisms
The large proposed increases for the research
directorates could mean a second year of gains 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 7,435 research grants next year, an 8 percent increase,
while at the same time increasing the average award size to $147,200 (up 3.0 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 in 2007. The broad-based increases would allow every
research directorate (excluding the new OCI) to increase the three key measures
of the number of research grants, the average grant size, and the projected success
rate.
Outlook
and Next Steps
The
full House is expected to debate and approve the Commerce-Justice-Science bill
within the next week, although final approval may be delayed by a crowded House
floor schedule. The Senate Appropriations Committee has drafted its own version,
but has not scheduled time to debate it. Congress will try to send a final version
of the bill to President Bush before the October 1 start of FY 2008. The President
has threatened to veto any 2008 appropriations bill that exceeds his request,
as the House version does by $2.3 billion, so the bill may have to go through
several rewrites and revotes before it can become law.
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July 20, 2007
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