Many US science agencies see cuts in final 2024 budget

This article is adapted from 5 March and 12 March posts on FYI, which reports on federal science policy. Both FYI and Physics Today are published by the American Institute of Physics.

Many US science agencies received top-line budget cuts in the final appropriations agreement for fiscal year 2024, with some parts of the Department of Energy a notable exception to the trend. President Biden signed the funding legislation on 9 March, in time to avoid a partial government shutdown.

Since Congress agreed to hold the federal government’s overall discretionary budget to about the same level as last fiscal year, science programs often lost out to other priorities in a mostly zero-sum budget.

The legislation drops NSF’s budget about 8% to just over $9 billion, partially undoing the 12% boost the agency received in the previous budget cycle. That increase relied on a special supplemental appropriation that Congress did not sustain this year. Congress framed the supplement as a down payment on the vision of the CHIPS and Science Act, which sets ambitious budget targets for NSF, NIST, and the DOE Office of Science. So far, Congress has not come close to those targets, and they will be difficult to achieve in the current tight-budget environment without further supplemental appropriations.

This year’s appropriation does increase NSF’s construction budget by 25%, a portion of which will go toward launching a supercomputer acquisition project. (See also “NSF likely to drop one of its two planned giant telescopes ,” Physics Today, 6 March.)

The DOE Office of Science budget increases about 2% to $8.24 billion, within which its Isotope R&D and Production program budget jumps nearly 20%. The Biden administration’s hope for a budget surge for the Fusion Energy Sciences program was not realized, with the final legislation providing only a 3.5% increase, similar to the increase provided for the High Energy Physics and Basic Energy Sciences programs. The legislation does, however, boost the National Nuclear Security Administration’s inertial confinement fusion budget by 10%, reversing the requested cut.

NASA’s Science Mission Directorate budget drops about 6% to $7.33 billion, with the cut falling entirely on the planetary science division, which will see a decrease of 15% to $2.72 billion. The cut is driven by concerns over the rising cost of the Mars Sample Return mission, which the Senate had proposed potentially canceling. The legislation defers decisions about the mission’s future; although Congress is waiting for the results of an internal NASA review, it does direct the agency to spend at least $300 million on the mission and up to the president’s requested level of $949 million. But the reduced planetary science top line will likely force the budget toward the lower end of that range, consistent with a recent NASA-ordered slowdown of work on the mission.

NIST’s base budget drops 8% to $1.16 billion. The figure excludes about $300 million in earmarks for research and construction projects external to the institute. Since Congress resumed earmarks in 2021, it has used NIST’s budget as the vehicle for funding many of those related to science. Meanwhile, the legislation will cut NIST’s budget for construction and facilities repair by a third, even though the agency faces a huge backlog of infrastructure modernization projects and made that work a top priority in its budget request.

Looking to 2025

Two days after signing the FY 2024 legislation, Biden released his FY 2025 budget request . Congressional committees will hold hearings with science agency leaders over the coming weeks to review the details as they prepare their own spending proposals.

The request seeks to raise the budgets of many of the same science agencies that just received cuts. Among the most favored agencies are NIST and NSF. The base budget for NIST (excluding earmarks) would increase nearly 30% and would include about 3.5 times as much as was provided in the FY 2024 budget for construction and maintenance. NSF’s budget would increase 12%.

Other major funders of the physical sciences would see smaller increases. The budget for the DOE Office of Science would increase 4%, and the budget for NASA’s Science Mission Directorate would increase 3%, only partially reversing its 6% FY 2024 cut. In that tight budget, NASA proposes sharply reducing operations of the Chandra X-Ray Observatory and canceling the planned Geospace Dynamics Constellation, a mission to study interactions between Earth’s upper atmosphere and its magnetosphere. NASA also does not specify a budget for Mars Sample Return, explaining that it is awaiting the results of the internal review.

A notable exception to the trend of budget increases for nondefense agencies is to NOAA’s Office of Oceanic and Atmospheric Research, which would see a cut of 11%, to $646 million.

As for defense agencies, the budget requests steep cuts to the Department of Defense’s portfolio of early-stage science and technology programs. The White House seeks a total of $17.2 billion, down from the FY 2023 level of $22.3 billion and similar to the amount requested for FY 2024.

In recent years Congress has routinely exceeded presidents’ budget requests for the DOD’s science and technology portfolio. It has yet to finalize the department’s FY 2024 appropriation.