Senate acts on R&D budgets

With two weeks left before the 1 October start of the next fiscal year, the Senate Appropriations Committee finally took action on the two spending bills that provide the bulk of federal funding for basic research in the physical sciences. The Senate bills, like the counterparts approved by House appropriators in July, would cut deeply into President Obama’s budget requests for those programs and spell doom for his initiative to double the budgets of NSF and the basic research programs at the Department of Energy and NIST over 10 years.

On 15 September Senate appropriators marked up the Commerce, Justice, Science, and Related Agencies bill that would cut NASA’s budget to $17.9 billion, which is $509 million below its FY 2011 level. The counterpart bill passed by the House includes $16.8 billion for the space agency. The Senate appropriated $6.7 billion for NSF, cutting $1 billion from the White House request. The House measure would provide $6.9 billion for NSF, a slight increase from FY 2011.

One week earlier, the Senate panel approved the energy and water development bill, which would provide $25.5 billion for DOE in FY 2012. That’s $800 million more than the House’s version of the bill, and it is below DOE’s FY 2011 appropriation. President Obama had asked for $30.7 billion for the agency.

House appropriators reported that their bills were out of committee prior to the early August agreement, between lawmakers and the White House, that raised the national debt ceiling. The Senate committee delayed its consideration of the legislation until an overall cap on FY 2012 discretionary spending set by the debt ceiling pact became available. Lawmakers will probably need to approve a continuing resolution to keep the government operating after the 30 September end of the current fiscal year. The House has so far approved 6 of the 12 annual appropriations bills, including DOE’s; the Senate has passed just one. Differences between House and Senate versions must be ironed out in conference committee, and the compromise bills debated by both chambers.

In a report that accompanied the Senate bill, DOE is instructed to extend to the agency’s renewable, fossil, and nuclear-energy applied-technology programs the same processes and procedures that are used by the Advanced Research Projects Agency–Energy. The committee ordered DOE to come up with an implementation plan within 120 days after the bill’s enactment. The House version does not include a similar provision.

An innovative feature of the ARPA-E peer-review process is the opportunity it provides for the grant applicants to respond to or rebut the comments of reviewers prior to the agency’s funding decisions. Large federal research grant programs, such as those at the National Institutes of Health and NSF, do not offer such an opportunity; unsuccessful applicants generally may resubmit their proposal in response to the next solicitation.

The Senate bill includes $1.8 billion for energy efficiency and renewable energy technologies, a near $400 million increase over the House version, but $1.4 billion less than the White House requested. The Office of Science, which funds most of DOE’s basic research, would receive $4.8 billion, slightly more than the House allowance, but $573 million below the administration’s request. The Senate committee instructed the Office of Science to create “a performance ranking” of all its ongoing multiyear projects, comparing their performance against the goals that were set for them at their outset. Such an assessment would be broader than a performance review contained in the House bill, which applied only to the basic energy sciences (BES) portion of the Office of Science. Unlike the House measure, which instructs DOE to terminate $25 million worth of the lowest-performing BES grants, the Senate committee had no explicit instructions to terminate projects.