C&EN Washington

President Clinton's fiscal 2000 budget is somewhat disappointing for research and development following substantial increases in most R&D programs for fiscal 1999, but it does have some positive initiatives. Overall, the President's proposal has R&D funding authority actually falling 1% to $78.2 billion, despite the expectation of significant budget surpluses and strong support for R&D in Congress. The funding levels proposed for individual agencies present a mixed bag for next year, with a few significant cuts mixed in with solid increases (C&EN, Feb. 8, page 8).

Sidebar: Glossary of budget terms

The culprit for the funding decline can be traced directly to a cut in development research at the Department of Defense. This funding is down about $3 billion from fiscal 1999 and represents a large chunk of the total federal package. This cut lowers defense R&D (including defense-related research at the Energy Department) for the first time in memory to a level less than 50% of the government's total research obligations. (In terms of proposed outlays, however, defense R&D is slightly more than half of the $73.6 billion total.)

Table: Clinton's 2000 budget calls for 1% decline in total R&D funding

As he seems to do each year, Clinton has packaged his R&D programs as a number of initiatives. Last year's "Research Fund for America"--which was predicated on an influx of money from a legal settlement with the tobacco industry that never materialized--is replaced with the "21st Century Research Fund." This is a grouping of most civilian R&D support programs that the Administration considers its highest priority. It not only includes the funding of the National Science Foundation and National Institutes of Health, but also medical research at the Veterans Affairs Department and educational research at the Department of Education. This fund is up 3% from a year ago, to $38 billion.

The other big initiative the President is touting is the Information Technology for the 21st Century, or IT², program (C&EN, Feb. 8, page 27). This $366 million, multiagency, cross-disciplinary effort in computer and information research was announced even before the budget was released, and it probably will get a big push by the Administration at hearings of the appropriations committees.

Rep. F. James Sensenbrenner (R-Wis.) chairman of the House Science Committee, which authorizes many science programs, says he has concerns about where the President plans to find the revenues for any R&D increase. "[The] Clinton budget actually exceeds federally mandated spending levels set in the 1997 budget agreement by $42 billion. The Science Committee will continue its oversight of science spending to root out waste, fraud, and abuse, which will ensure the maximum benefits from our science investments," Sensenbrenner says.

The following brief review of R&D budgets at the primary federal agencies that support research is presented with two caveats. The numbers given are mostly obligations, that is, the money agencies can contract to spend during the fiscal year. This may be more or less than the agencies actually spend, or outlay, each year. Also, the budget is a complicated document with various ways to add up programs to get totals. As a result, sometimes agency or department figures and totals from the Office of Management & Budget are not the same and can be published in different places as different amounts. The differences are usually small and reflect the different methods of dividing up the funds.

National Science Foundation. The Administration is seeking an increase of 6%, or $217 million, to $3.95 billion for NSF. Funding for the agency's research and related activities (R&RA) is up 7%, or $194 million, to $3 billion. Education and human resource activities get a 3% boost to $711 million, and funding for major research equipment falls 6% to $85 million.

Among the R&RA program accounts, the clear winner is computer and information science and engineering, whose budget is soaring 41%, to $422 million, on the wings of the much-touted, cross-agency Information Technology for the 21st Century initiative. With $146 million, NSF is the lead agency for the six-agency IT² program. Of that amount, $110 million will support research on software systems; scalable information infrastructure; high-end computing; and the social, economic, and workforce impacts of information technologies. The other $36 million will support development of terascale (trillion operations per second) computing systems, which will afford U.S. researchers access to leading-edge computational systems.

NSF Director Rita R. Colwell says the IT² initiative "will advance science and engineering across all disciplines and surely benefit education at all levels." She's also excited about the agency's other major initiative for 2000--an exploration of the role of biocomplexity in the environment. The $50 million initiative aims at understanding complex interdependencies among the elements of specific environmental systems and the interactions among different types of systems.

The time is ripe for such an initiative, Colwell notes, because the technology that can enable such understanding has finally arrived. As NSF notes in its budget explanation, this initiative "will build on a host of new methodologies and technologies that have transformed our ability to examine and explore biological complexity." These technologies include new biosensors, ecological monitoring devices, and functional genomics. Relevant to the biocomplexity initiative are two interagency efforts in which NSF participates. In fiscal 2000, it will contribute $187 million to one of these efforts, the U.S. Global-Change Research Program, and $109 million to the other, the Integrated Science for Ecosystem Challenges Programs.

In addition, NSF will spend $475 million in efforts related to "Educating for the Future: A 21st Century Workforce"--its third 2000 priority; $55 million on plant genome research; $34 million to facilitate collaborative research activities between academe and industry; $63 million on EPSCoR, the Experimental Program to Stimulate Competitive Research; and $25 million to support a new class of Science & Technology Centers.

What's hard to find in the budget summary, except in tables of numbers, is much mention of the old-line NSF divisions that support individual investigator-driven research--and the numbers aren't too encouraging. Most divisions are having to settle for percentage increases less than the overall 7% for research and related activities. Chemistry and materials research are at the lower end of the scale. Each is slated to receive a meager 2% funding increase, to $138 million for chemistry and to $190 million for materials research. Physics funding is up 3% to $167 million, as is atmospheric sciences to $164 million.

Table: NSF sees its total budget rise 6%

National Institutes of Health. Clinton has requested $16 billion for NIH, an increase of $319 million, or 2%, from fiscal 1999. This is considerably lower than the 14.6% increase in the fiscal 1999 budget. Although it has become rather commonplace for the President's request for NIH funding to be increased by Congress, the 2% starting point is low enough that it may be difficult to push it very high. Congress still intends to double the agency's budget by 2003, but it looks like it will have to be done in surges.

Many believe that the increase proposed for the NIH research institutes in the President's budget falls short of meeting the needs for biomedical research. It also falls below the current Biomedical Research & Development Price Index of about 3%. This index seeks to describe how much the NIH budget must change to maintain purchasing power.

Extramural funding makes up the lion's share, about 82%, of NIH's budget. With the proposed funding, NIH is expecting to support 7,617 competing research project grants (RPGs). Support for RPGs, including small-business innovation research and small-business technology-transfer awards, will increase by almost 3% over fiscal 1999.

According to Department of Health & Human Services documents, NIH plans to focus on four programmatic themes:

Exploiting genomics by accelerating the Human Genome Project, expanding work on model animal systems, learning to gather and use complex biological information, and building bioinformatics.

Reinvigorating clinical research by recruiting, training, and retaining clinical investigators.

Harnessing the expertise of allied disciplines, such as chemistry, engineering, computer science, mathematics, optics, and physics to work with medical scientists.

Reducing health disparities through research, training, testing interventions, and building international research capacity.

Chemistry is specifically cited in agency documents as a discipline critically important to medical research, particularly rational drug design.

Table: NIH budget growth slows considerably

Department of Energy. In the President's proposal, the Department of Energy's research and technology budget is up 3% from fiscal 1999, to approximately $7.5 billion, split among its many laboratories and offices. The research portion of the Office of Science's budget increases by $114 million to nearly $2.8 billion, and $70 million of that jump is earmarked for Information Technology for the 21st Century.

Most of DOE's share of this new funding goes to the Computational & Technology Research Program ($52 million), followed by Biological & Environmental Research (BER, $10 million), Basic Energy Sciences (BES, $7 million), and administration ($1 million).

Martha Krebs, Office of Science director, says the new computer program will take the computer assets developed by DOE's weapons-testing program and adapt and develop them for civilian scientific applications. In particular, she says, DOE will use the new funding to model complex global and combustion systems with the goal of having a computer system in place by 2004 that will be handling data at the trillion-operations-per-second rate.

About $25 million of the program will be used to procure computer hardware, $22 million for "enabling technology" to run the system, $10 million for software for climate-change modeling, and $7 million for combustion modeling software. Some $6 million will be "parked," Krebs says, and set aside for a future competition among DOE science programs for use in their own applications.

Overall, Krebs says she is quite pleased with the budget, as it aims for increases for all Science Office programs. Funding for BER, which appears to decline, actually increases because $46.8 million in congressionally mandated projects that the department did not seek will come to an end in fiscal 1999. Its base budget proposal is for a $21 million increase.

Another significant chunk of the office's increase is for its share of the Climate-Change Technology Initiative. The increase raises the current allocation of $13.5 million to $33 million--BES receives $20 million and BER gets $13 million. The funds will be used primarily to further ongoing research in technologies to reduce carbon dioxide emissions and to sequester carbon by using both natural ocean and terrestrial systems as well as by engineered CO₂-eating microbes.

The office's budget proposal also includes a second year of funding, at $214 million, for construction of the Spallation Neutron Source at Oak Ridge National Laboratory, Oak Ridge, Tenn. In fiscal 1999, $130 million was appropriated to the neutron source, although $157 million was sought. Oak Ridge managers had hoped DOE would make up the lost amount in this budget, but this was not to be in a tight budget year.

In other areas, DOE's R&D budget includes a 19% increase, to $830 million, for energy efficiency, conservation, and renewable energy, including solar research, according to DOE budget officials. Looking at overall program support, solar research receives a 27% increase to $274 million, and energy conservation R&D is budgeted for $647 million, a 23% increase.

Other large programs receive significant increases. Among them, a $114 million raise for the huge $4.5 billion cleanup program and $131 million more for DOE's $4.5 billion stockpile stewardship program that manages and maintains the nation's nuclear weapons.

Table: Energy Department R&D funding up only slightly

Defense Department. The President's proposal for total research, development, testing, and evaluation for defense is down significantly from the year before, an 8% drop, to $34.4 billion, almost all of the decrease in the demonstration category. Defense officials explain this by noting that several large projects have moved into the commercial stage and are no longer considered research items.

Basic research receives a barely noticeable increase of $5 million to $1.113 billion, and the applied research category is cut $192 million to just under $3 billion. These changes leave these categories with nearly the same amount of funding as they had two years ago. Although observers point out that the Administration gives lip service to the value of defense-supported research, it seems determined not to have too much of it.

According to the Administration, the proposed budget will support the department's Dual Use Science & Technology Program and the Commercial Operations & Support Savings Initiative, which put commercial industry's technical knowledge and economies of scale to the service of national defense. Also, $118 million is set aside for Advanced Concept Technology Demonstrations, which bring different experts together to eliminate communications barriers and improve management of a variety of programs. DOD says 44 demonstrations already are under way and 13 have been completed.

The Administration also proposes $837 million for continued development of the National Missile Defense System, which is supposed to protect the U.S. from a limited ballistic missile attack. Over the next six years, plans are to spend about $9 billion on this program, including construction and testing.

Table: Drop in Defense R&D is in testing programs

Environmental Protection Agency. The fiscal 2000 budget for EPA reduces R&D funding 17% to $689 million. EPA spokesmen say the decline reflects the agency's discontinuation of funding for congressional earmarks in fiscal 1999. This is standard policy, they say. If the agency were to fund the earmarks, or add-ons, that Congress designated the year before, they argue, the agency would be allowing Congress to establish EPA's priorities.

As it is in the current fiscal year, the EPA budget is structured so that each item is linked to a specific long-term goal, a change originally made to meet the requirements of the Government Performance & Results Act. The goals are clean air; clean and safe water; safe food; prevention of pollution and reduction of risk in communities, homes, workplaces, and ecosystems; better waste management, restoration of contaminated waste sites, and emergency response; reduction of global and cross-border environmental risks; expansion of right to know about the environment; sound science; improved understanding of environmental risk; credible deterrence to pollution; and effective management.

By far the greatest portion of the EPA R&D budget goes to the sound science goal, which is down 18% to $267 million. The largest part of this is devoted to research for ecosystem assessment and restoration, which increases from $112 million to $119 million. Another large fraction of the sound science money goes for risk assessment research, which increases from $51 million to $56 million. Research to detect emerging risk issues also falls under the goal of sound science, declining from $57 million to $50 million. Research on endocrine disrupters, which is included under emerging risk issues, is given a slight boost from $12.5 million to $12.7 million.

The only major R&D goal to get a significant increase in funding is research on global and cross-border risks. Funding for this program rises 22% to $73 million. This research will focus on evaluating the impacts of global climate change on human health, ecosystems, and economic systems. Among the possible impacts are the spread of vector-borne and water-borne disease, changes in landscape cover, the migration of plant and animal species, and changes in farm productivity and food distribution.

After Congress puts its mark on the budget, EPA's R&D funding probably will not decline as much as the President proposes. Observers expect that, just as it did in last year's budget cycle, Congress will step in and earmark funds for specific areas, and this will allow the overall R&D budget to remain flat or fall only minimally. For example, the budget proposes a 31% cut to $25.5 million for the Superfund Basic Research Program (SBRP), which is administered by the National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences with Superfund money. But EPA expects that Congress will step in with an add-on and maintain SBRP's funding at a fairly constant level, just as Congress has done every year for the past decade.

Table: EPA's science and technology budget is down 17%

Commerce Department. Research programs at the Commerce Department are carried out through the National Institute of Standards & Technology (NIST) and the National Oceanic & Atmospheric Administration (NOAA). The Patent & Trademark Office and the National Technical Information Service are also part of Commerce.

Table: NIST keeps pushing technology budget upward

In the budget proposal, NIST's funding comes to nearly $736 million, up 13% from its fiscal 1999 budget. Major increases occur in two areas, both of which may have a tough time getting approved by Congress. The Advanced Technology Program (ATP), a cost-sharing program that gives grants to mostly smaller companies to do high-risk research, gets a 21% increase to $239 million. Year after year, the Administration tries to boost funding for this program, and it is invariably taken down by the House Appropriations Committee to just about what it had been the year before. NIST Administrator Ray Kammer, however, remains confident about this year's increase, saying that more evidence is available showing that ATP is a very successful program.

The other NIST area marked for a large $50 million increase is construction, raising that total 88%, to $107 million. Most of that, about $95 million, goes into the construction of a new Advanced Measurement Laboratory at NIST's headquarters in Gaithersburg, Md., which will house the institute's most advanced metrology, physics, chemistry, electronics, engineering, and materials science research. The remaining funds address critical maintenance and safety needs at NIST's aging facilities.

The mainstay of NIST's programs are, of course, its measurements and standards laboratories. And the budget increases funding there just over 1%, to $285 million. Some of the program areas receive higher increases--for example, the computer science area funding rises about 7% to $48 million, and chemical science funding rises 3% to $34 million--but funding drops in several other areas. Building and fire research drops more than 8%, to $14 million, and physics programs and manufacturing engineering programs get almost the same as they did this fiscal year.

Funding also drops for the Manufacturing Extension Partnership program, which supports a nationwide network of centers to help smaller manufacturers improve their technology use. Its budget declines by $7 million to $100 million, as the government decreases its share of support for these centers. But funding for NIST's National Quality Program, which gives out the annual Baldrige Awards, receives a small 3.6% boost to $5 million, and it continues to expand its coverage to the health care area.

Funding for R&D at NOAA is set to decline 4% to $540 million. A large portion of the cuts are coming from the Sea Grant Program and from the National Undersea Research Program, which together take a hit of $15 million. Budget analysts at NOAA say the overall decline in R&D funding stems partly from the transition of some projects from the R&D phase in fiscal 1999 to the operational phase in fiscal 2000.

NOAA's research on climate gets an increase of $19 million. One large item in this budget, $5.7 million, is for a new massively parallel supercomputer for NOAA's Geophysical Fluid Dynamics Laboratory located at Princeton University. This computer will be used to improve forecasts of El Niño events, to model climate variability, and to make better hurricane tracking and intensity predictions.

Department of Agriculture. Steve Dewhurst, USDA's budget director, calls the agency's proposed research budget "aggressive." The plan includes a $51 million increase, to $837 million, for the Agricultural Research Service (ARS). That increase would support major presidential initiatives and other high-priority research including genetics, emerging plant and animal diseases, food safety, biological pest control, sustainable ecosystems, and global change.

In addition, the Cooperative State Research, Education & Extension Service (CSREES) receives a 15% increase from fiscal 1999, to just under $1.1 billion. Forest and rangeland research, part of the Forest Service budget, receives a 19% increase for the same period, to $235 million.

As part of the President's Food Safety Initiative, bioscience research gets a $25 million boost to more than $105 million. That increase will be split across the budgets of ARS, CSREES, and the Agricultural Marketing Service.

USDA is set for a $34 million increase, to $89 million, for global-change research and an additional $16 million for the President's Climate-Change Technology Initiative. The additional funding aims to support research on using biomass for energy, reducing emissions, and increasing carbon sequestration.

Table: USDA's research budget climbs 11%

Buildings and facilities funding is down $12 million. Of the $44 million requested, $4.4 million goes toward the modernization of the chemical wing at the Eastern Regional Research Center, which is near Philadelphia.

National Aeronautics & Space Administration. Despite the continued drop in funding for NASA, the agency's administrator, Daniel S. Goldin, is optimistic about the future. "For the sixth year in a row, NASA's budget has declined while productivity has increased," Goldin says. He says this is consistent with the President's vision of a government that works better and costs less.

Although NASA's overall R&D budget falls 1%, several areas of research receive increases. Earth science gets a 5% increase to almost $1.5 billion. For the largest part of that, the Earth Observing System, NASA is requesting about a $32 million increase to $663 million.

Space science also gets a slight boost, up 3% to about $2.2 billion. New initiatives included in this budget are the Mars Network and Mars Micromission programs, self-sustaining robotic networks, gossamer spacecraft, and next-decade planning. The Explorer Program, which supports investigations in all space science disciplines, receives a $45 million cut, to $151 million.

The Office of Life & Microgravity Science receives a 3% increase to $257 million. That office focuses on biomedical research and countermeasures, gravitational biology and ecology, and advanced human support technology, among other areas.

The budget for aerospace technology is down 15%, to just more than $1 billion. Much of that decrease is due to the discontinuation of the High-Speed Research Program and the Advanced Subsonic Technology Program.

Table: NASA's R&D budget falls slightly

The budget process. The President's proposal for fiscal 2000 funding now goes to the House and Senate Appropriations Committees, where the entire proposal will be divided into 13 appropriations bills. During the next several months, hearings will be held by the various subcommittees, and legislation will eventually emerge, setting levels of spending for all the federal departments, offices, and agencies. The numbers approved by Congress may be very different from those originally proposed by the Administration, but, historically, R&D has not been radically changed either up or down. The whole process is supposed to be completed and the bills signed by the President by Sept. 30, the end of fiscal 1999.

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