Given Tight U.S. Economy, Science Leaders Consider FY 1995 R&D Budget Satisfactory

They say the proposal may be the best they can get, but Rep. George Brown warns that it may not get through Congress intact Officials at major scientific societies and associations say they are generally satisfied with the Clinton administration's $71 billion budget request for science research and development in the 1995 fiscal year. The proposed funding levels, they contend, are about as favorable for the research community as could be expected-- in view of tight constraints on the overall federal budget. But Rep. George E. Brown, Jr. (D-Calif.), chairman of the House Science, Space, and Technology Committee--and regarded widely as Congress' No. 1 science expert--has expressed serious concern over the proposals and how they are likely to fare at the hands of his colleagues on Capitol Hill. The budget, released early last month, includes a 6 percent increase for the National Science Foundation, up to a level of $3.2 billion next year, and a 4.7 percent increase for the National Institutes of Health, up to $10.994 billion in fiscal 1995, beginning on October 1. Albert H. Teich, director of science and policy programs at the American Association for the Advancement of Science, observes that "the budget is consistent with what the administration has stated its priorities are. They're essentially putting their money where their mouth is." Teich adds that, "considering the overall state of federal finances and the caps on discretionary spending, we could not expect much--and we got a little [increase for R&D]. It's not much to jump up and down about, but on the other hand it could have been worse." And Martin A. Apple, executive director of the Council of Scientific Society Presidents (CSSP), a group headquartered in Washington, D.C., that brings together the heads of about 60 scientific societies, says that CSSP "would like to commend the administration for promising to ensure leadership in fundamental research ... and encourage them to act accordingly as they make decisions." Says Apple: "I'm very pleased to see the proposed increases for the National Science Foundation [and] the continued commitment to the Human Genome Project, the important commitment to energy conservation research." Another association official expressing overall satisfaction with the R&D budget is Clifford J. Gabriel, executive director of the Washington-based American Institute of Biological Sciences. "In the biomedical area it could be better, but at least we didn't go down any," he says. "I guess I was particularly pleased with the NSF budget. Also the USDA [United States Department of Agriculture] competitive grants program got a good budget. I think overall we did real well." Other association and society officials, while voicing general approval for the funding proposals, have some strong reservations. Budget authority; in millions of dollars (not including funds for facilities) FY 1993 FY 1994 FY 1995 Actual Enacted Request National Science 1,882 2,026 2,220 Foundation (research and related) National Institutes of 9,891 10,486 10,994 Health Other Department of 445 547 490 Health and Human Services Department of Energy 5,827 6,054 6,052 National Aeronautics 8,090 8,493 8,597 and Space Administration Department of Commerce 667 919 1,204 (including National Institutes of Standards and Technology) Environmental 508 536 582 Protection Agency Department of 1,335 1,393 1,394 Agriculture Department of 578 617 692 Agriculture Department of 38,617 35,538 36,971 Defense Department of 232 252 211 Veterans Affairs Other research 1,678 1,623 1,622 and developments TOTAL--federal R&D 69,750 68,484 71,029 Source: Office of Science and Technology Policy Frank Fitch, president of the Federation of American Societies for Experimental Biology (FASEB), based in Bethesda, Md., comments about the budget: "I think that it is fine as far as it goes, but it doesn't go far enough." He notes that for NIH, FASEB's consensus recommendation calls for a fiscal 1995 budget of $11.934 billion--$940 million more than the Clinton request. Fitch, director of the Ben May Institute at the University of Chicago, contends that strong support for biomedical research is essential for maintaining the U.S. world lead in biotechnology. "Biotechnology is probably the fastest-growing industry in the United States.... It's estimated that this is going to be up to a $50 billion-a-year business by the year 2000. Biotechnology is really fueled by discoveries that are made in the labs that are conducting fundamental research," the FASEB president says. Cornelius J. Pings, president of the Washington-based Association of American Universities, representing major U.S. research-intensive schools, says with regard to Clinton's R&D budget that "generally I think it was a quite favorable outcome, given the circumstances and the context." But Pings calls a proposed clampdown on indirect costs an "unfortunate" step that will tend to hurt younger researchers. The plan, he says, is "counterintuitive and in fact erodes the real impact of the budget increases." The Clinton budget suggests a one-year "pause" on reimbursements to universities for indirect research overhead costs, which currently run more than $3 billion annually. The budget document states that "in a year in which total discretionary spending is being frozen and government administrative costs are being aggressively reduced, it is necessary to ask universities and other nonprofit institutions to participate in this restraint. Instead of a permanent cut or cap on overhead payments, the 1995 budget proposes a one-year pause that instructs grantee institutions not to seek additional payments for overhead above the amounts claimed in 1994." `Grim' Outlook Rep. Brown's concerns about the budget address both the proposals themselves and how his fellow legislators will react to them. "The good news on deficit reduction heralds tough times ahead for the nation's R&D investments," Brown said in a statement. "The stringency of budget caps has seriously squeezed funding for a number of worthwhile science programs, and the long-term outlook for many science and R&D budgets is very grim." An analysis prepared by Brown's committee staff finds that under Clinton's budget, the nation next year would spend less on R&D--as a percentage of gross domestic product--than in any year since 1958. One area of reduced funding that has prompted strong criticism from Brown is the budget for the National Aeronautics and Space Administration. Brown said in another statement that "the FY95 budget is too low to support the vigorous space program envisioned by the administration and by NASA." The administration's budget calls for a cut of more than $160 million in overall funding for NASA, down to a fiscal 1995 level of $14.301 billion. This marks the first time since cancellation of the Apollo program in 1974 that a president has requested a decrease for NASA. The R&D portion of NASA's activities, however, is to receive a $105 million increase, up to $8.597 billion. The California Democrat noted that projections show NASA increases are expected to remain at about 1 percent for the next several years. In constant dollars, Brown said, "this growth will not even keep pace with inflation and represents an actual decline in NASA's buying power. This will almost certainly mean restructuring and redefining our space goals drastically." Moreover, the analysis cautions, Congress may well make program cuts or increases that are substantially different from the admini-stration's when the House and Senate appropriations committees take up the FY 1995 request. The analysis notes that options available to congressional appropriators are limited because of the budget "caps" or ceilings on discretion- ary spending that Congress and the administration have agreed to impose in order to help reduce the federal deficit. Such caps need to be adhered to without cuts in so-called entitlement programs, for example Social Security. Also, "once appropriations allocations are made to subcommittees, possible trade-offs are narrowed still further. NASA, for example, is pitted against housing and veterans programs; NOAA [the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Admini- stration] is pitted against the Census Bureau and the crime initiative; and general science and energy R&D [at the Department of Energy] are pitted against water projects." The committee analysis warns that "the combination of spending caps and the appropriations process rather arbitrarily circumscribes the arena within which science, space, and technology programs compete for scarce budget resources. As programs whose payoffs, no matter how valuable, tend to be longer-term and intangible in the short run, they are particularly vulnerable to short-sighted budget-cutting efforts." A considerably more upbeat examination of the administration's R&D budget has been issued by the Washington-based Council on Competitiveness, a nonprofit organization of chief executives from business, higher education, and organized labor. Studies by the council contributed to shaping Clinton's science and technology policy during the 1992 campaign and during his first year in office. The council's analysis says the proposed overall federal R&D spending level for fiscal 1995--$71.029 billion, or a 4 percent increase over the 1994 figure--"is highly respectable considering the declining nature of discretionary spending and the proposed terminations and reductions in many other areas." The analysis states: "Critical technology initiatives that target national goals--such as improved information and transportation infrastructure, health, and environmental protection--are a cornerstone of the FY 1995 budget." But the group expresses some concern with regard to the National Science Foundation, noting that "over the longer term ... NSF's budget is only expected to rise another 3 percent between FY 1995 and FY 1997. This slower rate of growth falls short of inflation and does not keep pace with the council's recommended timeframe for significantly increasing NSF funding." At a press briefing on the day the budget was released, White House science and technology adviser John H. Gibbons emphasized that "tough fiscal discipline is clearly the name of the game for us now, in the closing years of this century. And I think the FY '95 budget ... reflects just that. We have cuts throughout the federal government. But taken judiciously, and key presidential priorities are preserved--including a commitment to science and technology." Gibbons emphasized proposed substantial boosts for high- priority areas such as advanced manufacturing technology, particularly programs at the Commerce De- partment's National Institute of Standards and Technology; environmental technology; biomedical research; transportation; the national information infrastructure; and defense industry conversion under the administration's Technology Reinvestment Program. Also, he contended that the administration aims to "ensure continued leadership in fundamental science through continued investments in basic science, math, and engineering research. This fundamental research is what ultimately drives our basic understanding of the world, and is the seed ground for new technologies and new options for the future." At another February budget briefing, NSF director Neal Lane called the proposed $3.2 billion for his agency--including a $180 million, or 8.3 percent, increase (to $2.349 billion) for research and related activities--"a very good budget in a very tough budget year." Asked about how the foundation is responding to the Senate Appropriations Committee's call last fall for increasing its focus on "strategic" research areas, Lane responded that "the largest fraction of the increment is certainly [for] strategic research.... The reason that NSF was given real growth in its budget [for FY 1995] was because of the role NSF has been able to play and the capacity it has to invest additional resources in these strategic areas." NSF budget documents distributed at the briefing indicate that these requested increases include a 46.2 percent boost for global change research, up to $208 million; a 23.1 percent increase for high-performance computing and communications, up to $329 million; a 4 percent increase for science, mathematics, engineering, and technology education, up to $650 million; and a 3.3 percent increase for biotechnology, up to $206 million. At the National Institutes of Health, the administration's proposed 4.7 percent increase for fiscal 1995 is less than the 6.1 percent boost that NIH received for this year--which included $288 million added by Congress to the White House's request. During a February meeting with science writers, NIH director Harold Varmus commented that "NIH fared reasonably well, considering the constraints on discretionary spending." But, he added, in view of the modest spending increments, as well as a continuing need to increase the average size of grants, "an awful lot of excellent [research] proposals are not going to be funded." NIH's recently reconstituted Office of AIDS Research is budgeted at $1.379 billion for FY 1995, up from this year's AIDS research spending totaling $1.301 billion. The Human Genome Project, being conducted by NIH and the Department of Energy (DOE), is slated to receive a 22 percent increase, up to a fiscal-1995 level of $241 million. A number of science society and association officials echo either administration views or Brown's concerns, especially over Congress' treatment of the new proposals. Kathleen Ream, head of the American Chemical Society's department of government relations and science policy, says about the fiscal 1995 budget that "relative to NSF we were quite pleased. We were not expecting the administration request to be as high as it is." However, she says, it is likely that some of the funding increases proposed in the budget will face a tough fight on Capitol Hill, particularly in the Senate Appropriations Committee. "It looks real good on paper, but it's going to be an uphill battle," Ream says. Fred W. Weingarten, executive director of the Computing Research Association, also based in Washington, disagrees. He observes that, "considering the current politics of the day, it's an excellent budget. Probably it's one that even has some chance of succeeding in the Congress.... I'd rather have a modest request with some chance of success than a wild one with everything I'd want, but without a chance in the world." Robert Park, public affairs director for the American Physical Society, College Park, Md., sees merit in both views: "The fact is that the fraction of the gross national product going to science is declining--and that is not a reassuring trend. On the other hand, one has to be impressed that in a year in which there are serious cuts, science is not badly hurt, and many applied programs are up substantially." Under the fiscal 1995 budget, DOE support for high-energy physics is to be held essentially level at $621.9 million, while funding for other nuclear physics research is slated to be cut by 14 percent, down to $300.8 million. The Brown committee's analysis of the budget request notes that, particularly in view of last fall's congressional vote to terminate the superconducting supercollider, "level funding for the programs in FY 1995 will cause major disruptions and job losses within the high-energy physics community, as well as precluding any new research initiatives, such as U.S. collaboration on CERN's Large Hadron Collider." Other DOE programs are slated for substantial increases, including a 14 percent increase for renewable energy R&D, up to $397 million; a 60 percent boost for the electric and magnetic fields program, up to $16 million; an increase of almost 50 percent for energy conservation R&D, up to $645 million; and a 23 percent increase for electric and hybrid vehicles, up to $91.8 million. Park adds about the R&D budget in general: "It could have been a lot worse. These are hard times, and scientists are going to share in that. But I agree with George Brown that the trends are certainly worrisome, and one hopes to see that reversed." Barton Reppert is a freelance science writer based in Gaithersburg, Md.

Given Tight U.S. Economy, Science Leaders Consider FY 1995 R&D Budget Satisfactory

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