Bush's Science Budget: Will It Hold?

The president's financial plan looks good on paper, but Congress now faces the tough job of reconciling promises with harsh reality. WASHINGTON--Benjamin Franklin, the story goes, was asked what he and his fellow statesmen had produced during their deliberations in that steamy Philadelphia summer of 1776. "A republic," he answered, "if you can keep it." Every federal budget raises anew the question of whether a large increase sought for any one program will come at the expense of other programs. For scientists, the issue is best symbolized this year by the supercollider, for which the administration wants $300 million more on the road to completing the $8.25 billion facility in 1999. Administration officials say they have adhered to a promise to scientists that the 54-mile-long proton-proton accelerator will not drain funds from other research projects, both within the Energy Department and throughout the government. But many analysts express disbelief at such claims, pointing to the discrepancy between the sharp rise in SSC funding and the essentially flat level of spending within high-energy physics in recent years. "It must come out of other budgets," says the American Physical Society's Robert Park. "How could it not?" Even Secretary of Energy James Watkins, speaking at a press briefing last month, confessed that he doesn't know how long the administration will be able to keep its pledge. "The budgets for 1993 and beyond are very worrisome," Watkins told reporters. "There are a lot of research programs beginning to come to fruition, and the nation will be the real loser if the money for the SSC has to come from them. [Yet,] it will have to come from somewhere." APS's governing council was sufficiently troubled by the contrast between the rate of growth in the SSC budget and other programs that it passed a resolution at its January meeting urging the Bush administration to stick to its promise. The APS governing council, which includes several high-energy physicists, announced that "the SSC should be built in a timely fashion, but the funding required to achieve this goal must not be at the expense of the broadly based scientific research program of the United States." --J.M. Last month President Bush unveiled a 1992 budget request that, if enacted, would provide additional support for scientists in hundreds of fields. In fact, the request contains almost an embarrassment of riches, given the tight lid on spending created by the budget agreement struck last fall between the White House and Congress. But it leaves the scientific community with the same question: Will the intensified commitment to science, in the form of double-digit increases for several agencies, hold by the time Congress completes work on the budget this fall? The answer to that question depends in part on what one considers important in the proposed budget. Biomedical researchers who are clamoring for the National Institutes of Health to increase the number of grants that it adds to the system each year aren't happy with the level of spending requested. Despite a proposed 6 percent increase, to $8.78 billion, NIH officials have already said that they will be unable to reach the funding floor of 6,000 new grants these scientists are demanding (see accompanying story). Similarly, many physical scientists would like the portion of the National Science Foundation budget devoted to investigator-initiated research to rise much faster than the 17.5 percent overall increase, or $2.72 billion, that the administration is seeking for NSF (see story on page 6). For their way of thinking, anything less than a sudden doubling of federal spending on academic research, as suggested recently by Nobel laureate Leon Lederman in a report by the American Association for the Advancement of Science, falls short of solving the profession's current funding woes. Of course, the 1992 budget is good news for those scientists directly linked to projects targeted for exceptional growth. The staff at the Dallas site of the supercollider probably smiled at the news of a 120 percent jump for their acceleratory laboratory, to $534 million. The many scientists involved in global climate change research are doubtless pleased with a 24 percent increase, spread among nine agencies, in what would be a $1.18 billion program. The spirits of molecular biologists mapping various parts of the human genome, and related animal models, should be bolstered by the proposed 26 percent boost, to $169 million, divided two-to-one between NIH and the Energy Department. And agricultural research scientists whose work is not tied to existing federally funded labs should be heartened by the proposed 71 percent rise, to $125 million, in a competitive grants program run by the Agriculture Department. In addition, the Bush budget will no doubt please designers of both software and hardware with its high-performance computing and communications project, slated to grow by 30 percent, to $638 million spread among eight agencies. And science educators who fret about both the sorry state of public scientific literacy and the small pool of students who want to become scientists and engineers are surely gladdened by the clear presidential directive making science education a priority at all agencies that fund research. For presidential science adviser Allan Bromley, there is no question that the proposed 1992 budget will do good things for scientists of every stripe. "I have often said that the United States is underinvesting in research and development," he told reporters last month. "The increases proposed in this budget take steps to address that underinvestment." Bromley went on to say that the administration "will be working closely with Congress, and the scientific community and the public, to see that these proposals are translated into appropriations." Bromley acknowledges that the budget initiatives do not cover the entire spectrum of scientific research, however. And they include some projects--like the $170 million increase for the space station or the $2 billion boost for the Strategic Defense Initiative--that many scientists feel are unwarranted or a waste of federal dollars. Moreover, most science policy analysts don't even expect Congress to approve what the administration has requested. "This budget, like those in past years, is dead on arrival," says Robert Park of the American Physical Society. "The NSF budget, for example, is a wonderful asking budget. And if, by some miracle, Congress adopted it, we'd stay on track for the promised doubling within five years of the foundation's [NSF's] budget. But I don't think it's going to happen." A Senate staffer who follows science funding closely agrees that Congress will be hard-pressed to deliver on all the promises in the president's budget. "The 18 percent increase for NSF is a joke," according to the aide. "Overall, I'd say that it's an overly ambitious budget that sets a high-water mark for Congress to shoot for. But it's going to be a tough year, and scientists are going to have to work hard for whatever they can get," the staffer adds. Any year is a tough year when it comes to wringing significant growth from a budget that, in 1991, is expected to wind up more than $300 billion in the red. "It's not a foregone conclusion, that's for sure," says former NSF director Erich Bloch about the fate of the $13 billion--a $1 billion increase over 1991--that the administration is seeking for basic research. "But that's not a new phenomenon. This year it's the budget agreement that's causing a pinch. In the past it was Gramm-Rudman. There's always something that makes it hard to achieve what the president requests." The budget agreement, hammered out last fall, imposes a cap on the rate of growth of the entire budget, including domestic discretionary spending, that portion of the budget from which science and education are funded. The 4 percent ceiling agreed upon for 1992, say science policy analysts, will be very hard on those scientists who rely on funding from agencies with double-digit proposed increases. Not so, say Bush administration officials. They argue that the new system, in fact, is rigged in favor of science. By their way of thinking, the caps are intended to force head-to-head competition among all programs in the budget. And they assert that the role of research in strengthening the U.S. economy and preserving the country's high standard of living will carry the day. "It is our view that too much discretionary spending is linked to the present," says Robert Grady, associate director for natural resources, energy, and science in the Office of Management and Budget. "Science represents the future, and we think that when you compare one program to another, the future will win out." This year's proposed budget also avoids another trap that has tended to hinder growth in science, says Grady. The federal agencies that provide the bulk of support for the natural sciences, in particular NSF and NASA, are lumped together with programs for veterans and housing when Congress divvies up the federal budget. The appropriations subcommittee that oversees all those programs must steal from one area if it wishes to increase funding in another area. The president's budget tries to ease that problem, says Grady, by seeking a $1 billion increase for veterans benefits and a $2 billion increase for a new housing program for the poor along with the 18 percent and 15 percent increases, respectively, for NSF and NASA. "This way," he says, "the subcommittee won't be tempted to rob science to pay for these other programs." That may be true in theory, say policy analysts, but political realities suggest another outcome. "The HUD-independent agencies' subcommittee generally receives about one-third of the total for discretionary spending," says Grady. "It would need 45 to 50 percent to fund all of the things that the president has requested. That increase would have to come at the expense of the other subcommittee chairmen, and that's just not in the cards." WASHINGTON--There's more for individual investigators in the 1992 proposed budget for the National Science Foundation. But whether that translates into bigger grants or more awards, should the money still be there in the fall when Congress completes action on the federal budget, is a question that NSF officials expect to be answered individually by the foundation's five research directorates. The president's overall request for $2.72 billion--an increase of $406 million, or 17.5 percent--for the agency contains the usual array of offerings for scientists. About half of the $270 million boost in research should be available to program managers to fund additional investigator-initiated research, estimates acting NSF director Fred Bernthal. In addition, he says, most of the specially targeted programs will end up supporting individual scientists. The NSF budget is sprinkled with such new initiatives, some open to all fields and others aimed at a specific subdiscipline. A $50 million program addresses the need of university researchers of all stripes for costly scientific instruments. A $23.5 million request would begin construction of a $110 million gravity wave detector, a tool that astrophysicists say will help probe the origins of the universe. The NSF budget also seeks $16 million more to continue work on two 8-meter optical telescopes and an additional $25 million for scientists and engineers to pursue research on the synthesis and processing of advanced materials. All in all, the foundation's budget request greatly pleases NSF officials. "I must have the easiest job in Washington today," Bernthal told reporters last month at a budget briefing. "This budget will permit us to do three things: expand our research base, boost competitiveness, and maintain the country's technological leadership." (Walter Massey, Bush's nominee to succeed Erich Bloch as NSF director, appeared February 7 before the Senate and is expected to sail through the confirmation process and be on board no later than mid-March. Massey told senators that he was not involved in drawing up the 1992 budget, and he declined to answer questions about its contents until after he takes office.) Not everything would grow under the proposed budget, however. University administrators who were counting on money to renovate research buildings (commonly referred to as "bricks and mortar" to distinguish them from individual pieces of scientific equipment) have lost a $20 million-per-year program that issued its first round of awards only six weeks ago. Supporters of campus-based, interdisciplinary efforts--typified by the science and technology centers and the engineering research centers--will have to settle for continued funding of existing centers. And advocates of more graduate training fellowships are being asked to settle for a constant level of 1,100 new awards--although the size of the stipend will grow by $1,200, to $14,000 annually, to ease the effects of inflation. For administration officials, the NSF budget is a fulfillment of their repeated promises to bolster support for individual investigators. Indeed, John White, acting NSF deputy director, says that the proposal to boost spending on materials science owes its existence to such a commitment. "It's unusual for NSF to get such strong support for the continuation of a program," White says, referring to an existing $59 million effort across several directorates. "The only reason it got a 42 percent increase was because it will benefit individual investigators, working in small groups, at campuses around the country." How those funds are disbursed, however, won't be known for many months. Last year the success rate for all peer-reviewed grants was around 31 percent, based on 28,278 applications. NSF officials can't say how an influx of funds would change that percentage because, unlike officials at the National Institutes of Health, they do not establish a set number of grants to be funded each year. But controller Sandra Toye estimates that the success rate should rise "a few percentage points" if Congress grants the full increase. At the same time, Bernthal says that there is growing pressure to increase the size of individual grants, which on average have grown little in the past several years. Foundation officials say some programs, in fact, have set such growth as a priority in the coming year. The 1992 NSF budget contains several new wrinkles. One of the most controversial is the administration's decision to drop a two-year-old academic facilities program. A congressional favorite, the program announced its first awards in January, distributing $39 million to institutions in 37 states. At Massey's confirmation hearing, Sen. Edward Kennedy (D-Mass.) made it clear that he and other supporters of the program weren't happy with the excision. "With a budget that goes up 18 percent, zeroing out the facilities program doesn't make any sense," Kennedy, who chairs the Senate Labor and Human Resources Committee, complained to Massey. "And then they propose a $50 million program for instrumentation. We're going to resist that decision, I can tell you that." After the hearing, Kennedy said that he supported instrumentation as well and didn't feel that Congress should be forced to choose between the two programs. "We're going to try for more [than $20 million]," he said about the facilities program, "but not at the expense of instrumentation."

Bush's Science Budget: Will It Hold?

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