Federal R&D Budget Dashboard

Welcome to the AAAS Federal R&D Budget Dashboard, an interactive tool for exploring long-term federal funding trends within the context of the broader budget. The dashboard allows users to examine basic federal spending data by agency and/or by character of work over multiple decades in total dollars, as a share of the budget, and as a share of the U.S. economy.

NOTE: The federal definition of development has been revised. This impacts certain data series below. For more, click here.

See also: AAAS Historical R&D Tables

For more, download the dashboard guide.

To download data or save custom visualizations from the dashboard: You can save your visualizations by clicking the "download" button on the bottom-right, and you'll have the option to save as a PDF or an image file. To download specific data: select the data you want to grab in the visualization pane – either by clicking on and highlighting a specific time series, or by clicking-and-dragging across the visualization to highlight and select multiple series and/or data points – and click the “download” button on the bottom right. You'll have the option to download your selected data, or a complete crosstab.

Where does the data come from? Each budget cycle, federal agencies are required to tally and report detailed expenditures on R&D to the White House Office of Management and Budget (OMB). Since 1976, AAAS has compiled this data to assemble as complete a picture of government-wide R&D spending as possible. This data is supplemented by historical data published by OMB, and survey data published by the National Science Foundation’s National Center for Science and Engineering Statistics, which performs multi-sectoral surveys of R&D funders and performers throughout the year and is a valuable source of data.