A mixed bag for R&D in Obama’s last budget request

Released in February, President Obama’s final budget proposal favors the Department of Energy and NIST for R&D allocations while sharply cutting those for NASA and basic and applied research at the Department of Defense. It asks for a slight increase for NSF.

To supplement DOE’s, NASA’s, and NSF’s science and technology budgets with a combined $1.9 billion, the Obama administration seeks to establish new mandatory spending. Unlike discretionary funding, mandatory spending is not controlled every year by congressional appropriators. Rather, laws governing mandatory programs stipulate a source of funding to pay for them, such as proceeds from the sale of portions of the RF spectrum or newly imposed fees.

According to an analysis by the American Association for the Advancement of Science, the administration has identified offsets for only $800 million of its total $4.2 billion mandatory R&D proposal.

Congress rejected a previous administration proposal for mandatory R&D spending in fiscal year 2015, and it is likely so do so again this year.

Discretionary funding for DOE’s Office of Science, which supports the agency’s basic research programs in the physical sciences, would increase by 4.2%, to $5.6 billion. Changes in program allocations range from an 8.7% hike for biological and environmental research to a 9.1% decline for fusion energy.

For DOE’s clean energy R&D, the budget would provide $5.8 billion in discretionary funding, a 21% increase over the FY 2016 level. That boost would constitute the US down payment on a 5-year, 20-nation pledge, known as Mission Innovation, to double spending on clean energy technology (see Physics Today, February 2016, page 24 ).

Much of the clean energy increase would be for programs run by DOE’s Office of Energy Efficiency and Renewable Energy; they would grow 40%, to $2.9 billion. Such a large increase to the office’s budget will be a hard sell. Each year Congress has cut the request by hundreds of millions of dollars.

The Advanced Research Projects Agency–Energy, which provides grants to innovative clean energy R&D projects, would receive a 20% discretionary increase, to $350 million. The National Nuclear Security Administration at DOE would see an increase of 2.9%, with a 4.5% boost to its nuclear weapons programs and a 6.8% cut to its nuclear nonproliferation activities. That sharp decline is largely due to an administration proposal to terminate the mixed-oxide fuel production facility at the Savannah River Site and to dispose of surplus plutonium instead by diluting the fissile material and disposing of it in an underground repository. Congress rejected that plan last year.

NASA down, NSF steady

The proposed budget for NASA, declining 5.3% from its current-year level (excluding mandatory funding), offsets a 7.1% windfall the space agency enjoyed this year. Space exploration would be hardest hit, plunging 21%, to $3.2 billion. Science programs would recede 5.1%, to $5.3 billion, with planetary science falling 15%, to $1.4 billion.

The administration’s $7.6 billion request in discretionary funding for NSF is up just 1.3%. Research and related activities—the portion of NSF’s budget that funds individual investigators—would inch up 0.8%, to $6.1 billion. The mathematical and physical sciences and geosciences directorates would each receive $1.3 billion, virtually even with this year. The NSF request for clean energy R&D in support of Mission Innovation would jump 38% from FY 2016, to $512 million.

Although R&D spending at the Department of Defense would grow 2.6%, to $71.8 billion, the entire increase would be in the much larger “D” component. Basic and applied research would both decline: basic by 9%, to $2.1 billion; applied by 3.6%, to $4.8 billion. In past years Congress has restored funding to those programs. Funding for the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency would rise 3.7%, to $2.9 billion.

Funding for NIST’s core laboratory programs would rise 5.2%, to $730 million. The administration proposes $1.9 billion in mandatory funding for NIST to fully finance a network of 45 manufacturing innovation institutes by 2025.

With the exception of the 2009 American Recovery and Reinvestment Act’s one-time windfall of more than $17 billion for basic research and $33 billion for applied energy R&D and deployment, federal funding for R&D in the physical sciences has grown slowly but steadily throughout the Obama administration.

However, the president has fallen short on a pledge he made in April 2009, soon after taking office: increasing total US R&D spending—public and private—to 3% of GDP. According to NSF figures, the US spent 2.7% of its GDP on R&D in 2013, the latest year for which statistics are available; of that, 0.79% was federal. Without the mandatory spending, the proposed FY 2017 R&D budget would amount to 0.75% of GDP, according to the American Association for the Advancement of Science.

For more detailed budget information, see the FYI webpage (www.aip.org/fyi/archive ) of the American Institute of Physics, which also publishes Physics Today.