Special Report: War, Terrorism, and National Security Shape Bush R&D Budget in FY 2004; Civilian R&D Funding Flat

When the Bush administration unveiled its budget proposal last year, its first stated priority was “defeating terrorism abroad,” and the second was “protecting the homeland.” Accordingly, money flowed to the Department of Defense and to programs that would eventually become part of the newly forming Department of Homeland Security. All agencies, including those that supported science, were directed to shape their funding based on national security, an Office of Management and Budget official said bluntly.

Now, with the war in Iraq coming on the heels of the war in Afghanistan and the more general war on terrorism, national security has gained even more importance in the administration’s FY 2004 budget proposal. Even without including the tens of billions of dollars that will be needed to cover the cost of the Iraqi war, the FY 2004 budget proposal-including the federal R&D budget—remains steeped in war and national security concerns. Indeed, a budget resolution passed by the House of Representatives in March carried the stark title: “The Fiscal Year 2004 Wartime Budget Resolution.”

Overall, the FY 2004 budget calls for a record-setting $122.4 billion in federal R&D spending, up 4.4% from FY 2003’s record R&D budget. But the wartime nature of the budget becomes apparent by noting where the increases are aimed. Defense R&D, at $62.8 billion, would total more than 50% of the entire federal R&D budget. According to an American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) analysis, the DOD share “would surpass cold war funding levels at $62.8 billion [up 7.1%], with the entire increase for the development costs of new weapons and missile defense systems.” Basic and applied research funding in DOD would actually decline significantly.

At the Department of Energy (DOE), defense R&D would increase 8.6% to $4.2 billion, primarily in funding for the National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA). The new Department of Homeland Security (DHS), with a proposed budget of $36.2 billion, would have an R&D budget of $1 billion. Much of that research money would go to the newly created Homeland Security Advanced Research Projects Agency (HSARPA), modeled on DOD’s DARPA.

National Science Foundation R&D Programs

Civilian R&D flat

In general, civilian R&D pays the price for the increases in national security R&D. Nondefense R&D would increase by only 1.2%, to $55 billion, in the administration’s budget proposal. The National Institutes of Health (NIH), which completed a five-year doubling of its budget last year, would see a 2.7% increase this year. But as comparatively small as that is, the rest of the nondefense R&D budget is tiny enough that, if the NIH portion is removed, overall federal nondefense R&D would decline by 0.1%.

While the cost of war and national security will dominate the budget debate for the next several months, other significant issues—the large and growing budget deficits, the weak economy, and the loss of the space shuttle Columbia—will also influence how much money is available for R&D and where that money goes. In presenting the FY 2004 budget proposal to the House Committee on Science, Office of Science and Technology Policy Director John Marburger said it represented “some extraordinary new vistas of science with the potential to revolutionize our understanding and our capabilities. We cannot fund everything we’d like, but we will fund those exciting and high-priority initiatives that keep this dream of discovery alive.”

Several committee members responded with concern about the lack of funding for basic research and, in particular, the flat funding proposed for DOE’s Office of Science. Both Democratic and Republican members of the committee have strongly supported increases in science funding for the past few budget cycles, and Judy Biggert (R-Ill.) noted that “scientific research may not be as politically popular as health care and education, but it is as important to progress in these two areas as it is to ensuring America’s economic, energy, and national security.” Biggert has introduced a bill to increase proposed funding for the Office of Science from $3.3 billion in the Bush proposal to $3.6 billion.

Democrats not happy

The Democrats on the science committee were critical of the Bush R&D spending proposal, stating in their annual “views and estimates” report on R&D funding that the administration’s request is “inadequate” and “irresponsible.” The report, whose lead author is ranking committee Democrat Rep. Ralph Hall (Tex.) notes that DOE’s civilian research programs and several agencies, including NIST and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), face R&D cuts under the Bush proposal.

Citing the needs for more national security research, more investment in the physical sciences, and more funding at NASA because of the Columbia disaster, the Democrats called for an 8% to 10% increase in R&D funding in FY 2004. Without that level of funding, the report concluded, “it seems impossible to do the things we know we need to do in R&D.”

Department of Energy R&D Programs

So the stage is set for a summer of Congress pushing for more funding for basic and physical sciences while the administration, faced with mounting deficits and a desire for higher tax cuts, tries to hold the line on spending. The following agency highlights indicate some areas of contention.

National Science Foundation. At first glance, the NSF budget seems to have done reasonably well in the FY 2004 proposal. Bush recommends a 3.2% overall increase for the foundation, an increase of $171 million over the substantial (10.9%) increase Congress gave NSF in FY 2003. And within the 3.2% increase, physics would receive a 6.1% boost to $218 million from current funding of $205 million.

So why did Senate Appropriations Committee Chairman Christopher Bond (R-Mo.) and the committee’s ranking minority member Barbara Mikulski (D-Md.) use the words “paltry” and “disappointing” to describe the NSF proposal? Because the 3.2% increase would result in a total NSF budget of $5.5 billion, significantly less than the $6.4 billion authorized for FY 2004 in the NSF Authorization Act, signed by President Bush last December. The bill, widely supported in Congress, was intended to be the first step in a five-year plan to double NSF’s budget.

Marburger cited the 10.9% FY 2003 boost in NSF funding by Congress as a reason the FY 2004 proposal was scaled back from the authorized level, and he noted that the NSF increase would still be higher than that for most other R&D agencies. The NSF doubling bill signed by the president resulted in part from a report by the President’s Council of Advisors on Science and Technology (PCAST) that said funding for the physical sciences and engineering has not kept pace with that for the life sciences, particularly the large increases NIH has experienced in recent years.

“Given the record of recent years and with the newly enacted NSF Authorization Act, it is likely that Congress will again exceed President Bush’s request in FY 2004,” said Association of American Universities official Tobin Smith in his AAAS analysis of the NSF budget. The final resolution of the NSF budget debate is crucial to university-based researchers, Smith noted, because while NSF “represents less than 4% of the total federal budget for research and development, it supports roughly 50% of all non-medical basic research at colleges and universities.”

Under the proposal, funding would be $1.1 billion, an increase of 2.6%, for NSF’s mathematical and physical sciences directorate, which supports astronomical sciences, chemistry, materials research, mathematical sciences, physics, and multidisciplinary activities. The proposal says emphasis will be placed on particle and nuclear astrophysics, computational and information-intensive physics, quantum information science, biological physics, and advanced R&D toward next generation particle accelerators and gravitational wave detectors.

A new science and technology center focusing on biophotonics would be created under the proposal, and full funding would be available for continued operations of the Michigan State University National Superconducting Cyclotron Laboratory, and the Laser Interferometer Gravitational Wave Observatory (LIGO) in Louisiana and Washington State.

NSF also funds 29 materials research science and engineering centers throughout the US, and under the budget proposal, funding would increase 5.8%, from $233 million to $246 million. About $5 million of the increase would go to nanoscale science, which is one of the major focuses for the Bush administration. Indeed, NSF has about $249 million in its budget for projects related to nanoscale science and engineering.

Other priority areas for NSF are information technology research ($218 million), in which the foundation leads a multiagency initiative; mathematical sciences ($202 million), with programs intended to create closer connections between research and education; biocomplexity and the environment ($100 million), which would integrate research in ecological, social, and physical Earth systems; human and social dynamics ($24 million), which would integrate information from biology, engineering, information technology, and cognitive science; and Workforce for the 21st Century ($9 million), which is intended to create a scientifically literate workforce.

Department of Energy. Except for the flood of money flowing to DOD, the administration’s emphasis on national security is nowhere more evident than at DOE. The department would see R&D funding increase by 4% to $8.5 billion under the FY 2004 budget, but the entire increase would go to DOE’s defense activities. Funding for the Office of Science, which oversees all 10 of the national laboratories and programs in high-energy physics, nuclear physics, fusion research, and advanced computing, would remain flat for the fourth year in a row at $3.3 billion. Within that budget, there is shifting and relabeling of money to keep some programs going.

A $64 million boost in nanoscale science funding, for example, would come largely from a planned decrease in construction costs of the Spallation Neutron Source (SNS). About $12 million for the much-publicized US effort to rejoin the International Thermonuclear Experimental Reactor (ITER) would come mostly by redesignating money already in the Office of Science’s burning plasma program.

Overall, DOE’s civilian research programs remain essentially frozen at FY 2003 levels and just 0.9% above FY 2002 levels. The largest of DOE’s science R&D accounts is basic energy sciences, which would receive $1 billion, a reduction of 1.4% from the FY 2003 levels. However, since much of the reduction would come from the end of SNS construction money, chemical, geosciences, and energy biosciences would remain at the FY 2003 level. Materials sciences would increase by 3.7%.

High-energy physics would receive a 1.8% increase from $725 million to $738 million. About half of the increase would go to enhance operations of Fermilab programs, and to the B-factory at SLAC.

Nuclear physics would receive a 2% increase to $389 million. Last year’s increase was 8.8%, aimed primarily at increasing utilization of the Brookhaven Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider and the Thomas Jefferson National Accelerator Facility.

Fusion energy sciences would remain flat at $257 million. Office of Science Director Raymond Orbach has spent much of the last year campaigning to rejoin ITER, and he achieved success early this year when President Bush announced that the US would once again become a partner in the international project. The US left ITER several years ago because of high costs, which have since been cut in half. Orbach has said repeatedly that participation in ITER might allow the first commercial power generated by fusion to be available in about 35 years. Although he got presidential approval to rejoin ITER, Orbach didn’t get new money to pay for it, which resulted in reshuffling the existing burning plasma budget. Orbach told a congressional committee in March that although the current ITER spending was “very modest,” it is expected to increase significantly in FY 2006. Eventually, the US expects to pay about $100 million a year to participate in the project.

Biological and environmental research, the third largest science division at DOE, would receive a 5.1% cut to $500 million. But in a complicated process of cutting congressional earmarks and restoring base program funding, the division actually does reasonably well.

NASA R&D Programs

For the second year in a row, the big winner at DOE is the NNSA, with its budget recommended to increase 9.4% from $3.7 billion to more than $4 billion. Stockpile stewardship, which received a whopping 49.2% increase from Congress in FY 2003, would decline 7.3% to $433 million in FY 2004. Advanced simulation and computing, used to do three-dimensional modeling of nuclear weapons detonations, would receive a 6.6% increase, while the National Ignition Facility funding would drop, as expected, by nearly 30% as construction moves closer to completion.

NASA. The FY 2004 budget sees a continuation of belt tightening at the space agency, with the $15.5 billion budget request representing a 3.1% overall increase from FY 2003. However, the destruction of the Columbia on 1 February put the entire FY 2004 NASA budget in doubt. Nearly $6.6 billion of NASA’s annual budget is directly affected by the loss.

The mood in Washington was captured by the House Science Committee’s Rep. Hall when he said “we need to determine the impact of the Columbia accident on NASA’s budget and programs,” and whether NASA should delay funding research into future manned spacecraft designs until the US increases the survivability of the shuttle. The accident has already cost NASA $100 million to recover Columbia’s debris, and the cost of safety reviews and upgrades for the remaining shuttle fleet remains unknown. Delays caused by grounding the shuttles are also expected to affect NASA’s space science budget.

The Columbia accident is also causing significant longer-term changes in the operation of both the shuttle program and the International Space Station. There are no plans to build a replacement shuttle for Columbia, and the burden on the three remaining shuttles to service the space station means that nearly all the science missions will be cut from the shuttle program, according to Roy Bridges, director of the Kennedy Space Center.

With the shuttles grounded, the space station cannot maintain enough of a water supply to support the traditional three-member crews, so the number is being dropped to two. Two-member crews will spend most of their time maintaining the station, leaving no time to do science experiments.

The FY 2004 budget proposal includes almost $973 million for biological and physics research at NASA, a 6.5% increase over the FY 2003 budget. But with no science being done on the space station, it remains unclear how that part of the research budget will finally be allocated. The full impact of the Columbia disaster on the shuttle fleet, said Michael Kostelnik, deputy associate administrator for the space station and space shuttle program, will only become apparent in the FY 2005 budget. NASA intends to continue flying the shuttle in one form or another until 2020.

While the shuttle will remain the only heavy lift option for NASA, a new space vehicle called the Orbital Space Plane, designed to take crews to the space station, may be developed by 2010 from the agency’s billion-dollar Space Launch Initiative. Discussions are ongoing to determine if the DOD will fund part of the program.

Three of NASA’s major programs, space science, Earth science, and aeronautics, are not directly affected by the grounding of the shuttle fleet. Funding for aeronautics research would remain roughly static, and NASA’s commercial technology program would be terminated under the administration’s proposal. The Space Science program sees a 15.5% increase in its budget, including a 30% increase for exploration of the Solar System.

The budget proposal also includes three new programs: Project Prometheus for space nuclear power and propulsion systems, optical communications, and the Beyond Einstein initiative. Project Prometheus incorporates last year’s nuclear power initiative and a proposal for a $4 billion spacecraft, the Jupiter Icy Moons Orbiter (JIMO), which uses a nuclear-electric propulsion system.

The optical communication program will solve a bandwidth problem in communicating with distant spacecraft by taking advantage of what commercial industry and DOD have done in the field.

Department of Defense R&D Programs

The Beyond Einstein initiative provides funds for three key spacecraft programs: Constellation X, a group of x-ray telescopes that will simultaneously study the same object; the Laser Interferometer Space Antenna (LISA), three spacecraft that will study gravity waves; and the Dark Energy Probes, which will determine the amount of dark energy in the universe (see Physics Today April 2003, page 10 and page 53 ).

Earth science funding decreased by 3.5% as most of the major satellite programs—such as AURA, CloudSat, and CALIPSO—are ready for launch in 2004. New initiatives still await the findings of the review of the interagency US Global Change Research Program.

Perhaps the biggest change to NASA is one of the smallest in direct cost: the adoption of a strategic planning office and a new financial management system. Both will help NASA to implement its vision and mission, said NASA Director Sean O’Keefe, and clarify what money is being spent where, a problem that has plagued the agency for several years.

Department of Defense. With the global war on terrorism, as well as the related shooting wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, DOD would see its R&D budget grow to a record-setting $62.8 billion in FY 2004. That $4.2 billion, 7.1% increase would come on top of record-breaking increases of nearly $8.8 billion in FY 2003 and $7.1 billion in FY 2002.

National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration R&D Programs

While the R&D budget is enormous and growing quickly, virtually all of the increases would go to the development of new weapons systems. Missile defense would increase 22% to $8.3 billion, and a new fighter jet project would get $4.4 billion, a 28% increase.

Although the development side of R&D is increasing dramatically, basic and applied research at DOD would decrease significantly in FY 2004. Basic research, known as “6.1,” would fall 7.7%, while applied research, called “6.2,” would drop 14.4%. Together the two science categories would decrease 12.7% to $5 billion, below the FY 2001 funding level. In recent congressional testimony, DOD officials said they would support an annual 3% increase benchmark for basic, applied, and advanced technology research, but that is not reflected in the FY 2004 request.

The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) R&D funding would increase 9.8%, a $264 million increase to $3 billion. The agency intends to focus the increased funding on tactical technology, materials, aerospace systems, electronics, and sensor and guidance technologies.

Department of Homeland Security. The department, which began in March as a real, functioning entity, is a consolidation of 180 000 federal employees from nearly two dozen agencies. Most of its programs, including R&D, are transfers of programs from DOD, DOE, and the Departments of Agriculture and Transportation. In early April, Charles McQueary, a mechanical engineer and former president of General Dynamics, was sworn in as the undersecretary heading the Directorate for Science and Technology.

Under the FY 2004 budget proposal, McQueary would oversee 80%, or about $800 million, of the $1 billion DHS R&D portfolio. It is difficult to draw exact comparisons to past funding levels for programs that are being transferred into DHS, but a AAAS analysis concluded the R&D funding for the transferred programs would increase about 50% in FY 2004.

McQueary’s directorate would, according to the DHS proposal, distribute funding as follows: $137 million for development of radiological and nuclear countermeasures; $365 million for development of biological countermeasures; $65 million for chemical or explosive countermeasures; $90 million for threat and vulnerability assessments; $25 million for a standards program to develop, test, and evaluate criteria for homeland defense technologies; $55 million for conventional R&D missions; and $62 million to fund university research, as well as basic research into emerging threats. The directorate would also be home to HSARPA.

NIST and NOAA. R&D funding at NIST would decrease 22%, to $410 million from $527 million. Much of the decrease is due to another attempt by the administration to eliminate the Advanced Technology Program. The ATP, which funds selected high-risk technology projects in private industry, has been under assault by some congressional Republicans for years for “playing favorites” in the private sector. The program was zeroed out by the administration in FY 2002, but saved by congressional Democrats with $123 million. In FY 2003 the administration proposed $81 million and Congress gave ATP $153 million. In FY 2004, the administration is proposing $10 million, just enough to close the program.

NIST’s Science and Technology Research Services, which fund’s the institute’s laboratories in Maryland and Colorado, would receive a 7.3%, or $22 million, increase in R&D funding. About $10 million of that would go for homeland security R&D. The proposal also includes $7 million to equip and operate a new advanced measurement laboratory in Maryland.

NOAA would see a 6% increase to $3.3 billion in its overall budget, but R&D spending would be cut 1.4% from $684 million to $675 million in its FY 2004 budget. The cuts would come primarily from the National Ocean Service, the Office of Oceanic and Atmospheric Research, and the National Environmental Satellite, Data and Information Service.