New Criteria for Determining Interagency R&D Budgets

After more than a year of internal discussions about how to better control federal R&D spending, the Bush administration has set out specific priorities and guidelines it expects federal R&D agencies to follow in developing their upcoming fiscal year 2004 budget proposals. In a memorandum to agency heads, Office of Science and Technology Policy Director John Marburger and Office of Management and Budget Director Mitchell Daniels spelled out priority research areas and specific “investment criteria” to determine which R&D programs deserve funding.

The memo, “FY 2004 Interagency Research and Development Priorities,” covers all federal research—both basic and applied—that involves funding from more than one agency. According to a cover letter from Marburger and Daniels, the memo “provides guidance on the types of R&D programs the administration will favor when making fiscal year 2004 investment decisions, identifies priority activities requiring significant interagency coordination, and sets forth R&D investment criteria that departments and agencies should observe and implement.”

“This document is really two documents,” Marburger said in an interview. “The first one is the priorities message from me and Mitch Daniels. The second one is the OMB document that we’ve been working on, the one that includes the performance criteria. That is the embodiment of the president’s management agenda for research.” The priorities message says, “We encourage agencies to fund new, high-priority activities by reallocating resources from lower-priority or recently completed activities. Requests for funding above guidance levels will require a compelling rationale that the activity is important, that the agency is the best one to conduct the activity, and that funds from lower priority or recently completed programs cannot be substituted within the agency’s guidance level.”

The memo lists the administration’s six priority areas.

Homeland security and antiterrorism R&D. “Agency R&D efforts in this high-priority area should dramatically reduce the nation’s vulnerability to terrorism,” the memo says. “These include enhancing our capabilities for (a) early detection of catastrophic terrorist threats and any subsequent exposures, (b) rapid response to them and mitigation of their effects, and (c) physical decontamination techniques and prophylactic and treatment measures.” Research, the memo continues, should focus on “areas with the potential to dramatically enhance our capabilities for detecting the presence of, and responding to, nuclear, biological, chemical, radiological, and conventional explosive threats….”

Networking and information technology R&D. The administration has pushed hard to improve computational and networking capacity, and will continue to do so in the FY 2004 budget. Sophisticated data networks “directly affect research across the scientific disciplines,” the memo says.

National nanotechnology initiative. Another of the president’s favorite programs, the “nanoscale R&D agenda includes a balance of basic and applied research,” the memo says. Of particular importance is research on “nanostructures that more effectively collect and deliver samples to sophisticated sensors (chemical, biological, radiological, electromagnetic, photonic, acoustic, or magnetic).”

Molecular-level understanding of life processes. This encourages coupling “modern computational power to our ability to manipulate biological systems at the molecular level” in a quest to “unravel the complexity of life at the molecular, cellular, and organismal levels.”

Climate change science and technology . This priority calls for “investment in R&D that will address major climate policy decisions and provide a framework for understanding and addressing long-term climate change.”

Education research. This priority calls for continuing support for strengthening math, science, and reading education as well as advancing the use of education technology.

“This is not a comprehensive list of all administration science and technology priorities,” Marburger said. “It does not include priorities that fall within the purview of a single agency, things like particle physics, or health research, or chemistry, that are pretty well focused in a traditional department such as DOE or NSF. The priorities we have spelled out explicitly involve cross-cutting areas in research.”

Much of the memo lays out the R&D investment criteria in the form of three “tests” that program managers at federal agencies are expected to use to set their funding proposals for FY 2004. “The focus for policy officials and program managers should not be on how much we are spending, but rather on what we are getting for our investment,” the document says.

All program managers, the memo says, “should be able to show the extent to which their programs meet the following three tests.”

Marburger described the three tests as “commonsensical,” noting that “relevance, quality, and performance are things that every proposal already embodies in some way.” He also emphasized that the new criteria were for federal agencies, not individual researchers. “It’s the agencies that are being held responsible for spending the money properly. We’re not interested in adding to the burden of individual investigators.”

This fall, officials from OSTP and OMB will meet with agencies to measure the budget requests against the new criteria.