Federal Science Support Keeps On Rising, But So Do Complaints About Underfunding

Sidebar: NIH's Nealy to Play the Numbers Game Sidebar: NSF's Ambitious Plans Outpace Budget Hikes Despite big budget hikes for NIH and NSF, many researchers and officials claim that government backing is inadequate WASHINGTON--The budgets of most federal research agencies rose this year, some by double digits, as Congress once again was generous to science. The primary sources of money for academic research had good years: the National Institutes of Health's budget increased by 9 percent, to $9.01 billion, and National Science Foundation funding rose 16 percent, to $2.68 billion. And there are strong indications that President Bush's proposed 1993 budget, to be unveiled February 3, will again feature significant increases for NSF and other agencies. The budget also is expected to highlight government-wide initiatives in biotechnology, science education, high-performance computing, advanced materials and processing, and global climate change. Nevertheless, many government officials and policymakers are singing the blues when it comes to federal funding of science. NIH director Bernadine Healy says that she's "very disappointed" in what the administration will be shipping to Congress next month. Physicist William Happer, head of the Energy Department's office of energy research, has spent the past few months pleading for more funds for energy research in 1993. And the National Science Board, which oversees NSF, has asked board member Roland Schmitt to look into the causes of what Schmitt calls "a malaise" that has settled over the academic research community because of a perceived funding crisis. Why are these complaints and entreaties surfacing in the midst of budget increases? In part, say observers, it's because scientists always need more. "Our production of bright, young scientists is outstripping our science budget," says John Gibbons, director of the Office of Technology Assessment, which advises Congress on technical issues. "The overall dollars for science may have increased, but in real dollars the budget is under great stress because the cost of doing science is rising rapidly, the overhead is increasing, and the number of scientists with good ideas is going up faster than the budget." Scientists also fear that, while 1992 may be okay, worse times lie ahead. Because of caps imposed as part of the 1990 budget agreement between Congress and the president, domestic spending in all areas can increase by only $7 billion in fiscal year 1993, and civilian research agencies must fight to hold onto their share of that increase. Within the subcommittee that funds NASA, NSF, and EPA, for example, those research agencies must vie with housing and veterans' care for an estimated $2 billion more in federal support that will be doled out next year. Anticipation of that spending cap has already led DOE's Happer to ask an advisory board of scientists to draw up scenarios for how to cope with cuts of 10 percent or greater in his 1993 budget for high-energy and nuclear physics (The Scientist, Nov. 25, 1991, page 3). And a Senate staffer who follows science funding issues predicts that "NSF is going to be in for some tough sledding in [fiscal] 1993. They were clearly the big winners this year, and that means that the big increases next year are likely to go to somebody else." Resentment Brews But there's another reason why scientists are complaining about federal spending on nonmilitary research. Huge increases in one area do not help scientists working in fields in which budgets are growing much more slowly. Sharp increases in the budgets of specific programs--as has happened in the past decade for AIDS research, the superconducting supercollider (SSC), the Human Genome Project, and scores of other, smaller projects--often leads to resentment among researchers in areas not similarly endowed with additional money. Despite these concerns, Bush administration officials insist that 1993 will once again be a banner year for science. "We feel that it's possible within the cap on domestic discretionary spending to fund both big and little science," says Robert Grady, awaiting confirmation as deputy director of the Office of Management and Budget and current head of the environment, energy, and natural resources portion of the federal budget. "There's nothing in that agreement that says you have to cut little science to fund big science." Asked specifically if the SSC was draining funds from researchers in other areas of physics, presidential science adviser Allan Bromley last month predicted that "nuclear science and the rest of physics will do fine" in the proposed 1993 budget. These high-level reassurances notwithstanding, the recently approved 1992 budget provides several examples of how sharp increases in one area leave the rest of science unaffected. A $275 million increase in this year's budget for the National Cancer Institute, which stands now at nearly $2 billion, will not boost the funding chances, now about 20 percent in some institutes, of an NIH grant applicant in an unrelated field. Nor will a 45 percent increase in what NSF will spend in 1992 on science education, bringing its total to $465 million, provide help to fledg-ling researchers looking for their first NSF grant. Similarly, a doubling of the SSC's budget, to $484 million in 1992, is small consolation to materials scientists and others pursuing "small" science. And a decision by Congress to fully fund the president's $2 billion request this year for the space station Freedom has had an adverse effect on other space science programs, triggering delays in plans for a space-based infrared telescope and a probe to study a nearby comet and asteroid, as well as placing a tight cap on future-year spending for NASA's Earth Observing System program. Many investigators, as a result, are convinced that the federal contribution to science isn't keeping up with the opportunities that exist in thousands of laboratories across the country. Biomedical researchers who have repeatedly revised their grant applications in the hope of doing well enough to obtain funding claim they can hardly believe that the NIH budget has doubled over the past eight years. Experienced materials scientists who describe how their younger colleagues are unable to set up their own labs say they are not impressed by the fact that the NSF budget has also doubled over that same period. NIH's Healy, on the job since April of last year, has called for a presidential commitment to double her agency's budget, a commitment that matches an administration promise first made to NSF in 1987 and repeated each year since then. A draft of the strategic plan for her agency that she and her senior staff are developing calls for annual growth of "12 to 15 percent, as a minimum, with some front-loaded growth of 15 to 18 percent needed in the short run." Healy explained the reasoning behind the request recently before members of the director's advisory committee who gathered at NIH. "If you take out AIDS and the genome project, we have had almost no growth in the past four or five years," she said, applying a yardstick that measures NIH's budget rise against the annual rate of biomedically driven inflation. "At the same time, there's been such an explosion of opportunities in science, based on so many discoveries, that a no-growth portfolio is simply not appropriate." A more immediate cause for concern among biomedical researchers is the decision by Congress to hold back some $575 million of NIH's budget until September 30, the last day of the current fiscal year. Although NIH will eventually receive the full amount of the delayed funding, the delay will force the agency to spend it in fiscal 1993. That arrangement allowed legislators to keep present-year spending from exceeding the limits set by the budget agreement. But it could impinge on NIH's proposed budget for next year. "What we did was a gimmick," says an aide to the House appropriations committee who requests anonymity. "The 1993 numbers are now untenable, even if you presume some rate of increase in domestic spending and maybe even a shift of funds from defense." The aide says that delaying funds again this year could eventually eliminate most of the money available for new initiatives: "My concern is that, once you begin that rollover, it could grow worse each year. And unless you get a ton more money, pretty soon you could find yourself in big trouble." Within NSF, the biggest question to be addressed is the agency's ability to support several large, multiyear projects without cutting into its support for single investigators. "These facilities are eating us alive," says David Sanchez, assistant NSF director for the mathematical and physical sciences (MPS) directorate. "I'd like to follow the philosophy of building these things one at a time, finishing one before moving onto the next. But the world doesn't work that way." A Priority Area One department of NSF that has not had to deal with major decisions on what to cut is the education and human resources directorate. The budget for that directorate has nearly quintupled in the past five years, with Congress adding to what the foundation has requested each year, especially for elementary and secondary school science education. In fact, if that trend continues, the directorate could soon become the largest single unit within NSF, edging out MPS. Some bench scientists look enviously at that rapid growth, extrapolating what such a rise would mean for their discipline. Sensitive to those feelings, NSF director Walter Massey emphasizes that it's important for Congress to understand that higher education, including support for graduate training and postdoctoral fellows as part of research grants to individual investigators, "cannot be separated from K-12 science education, and that both are critical needs." But he sees the rising education budget as a vote of confidence for NSF and evidence that "the American people believe strongly that NSF can make a difference" in improving science education. At the same time, NSF officials in other directorates complain that the public's belief has not been translated into funding for their budgets. As Sanchez notes, "We and the other research directorates would like to do more with education, especially in the undergraduate area, with such things as curriculum development and research experiences for undergraduates. But that money comes out of our research budgets, and it's becoming increasingly hard for us to afford those things along with our other commitments." Tough Decisions OTA's Gibbons says that the funding situation for science will remain uncertain until more of his colleagues are willing to wrestle with and reach decisions on which proj-ects are most important to them, and which must be trimmed or abandoned. "If we're dealing as a nation with a relatively zero-sum game, meaning that if you want to do this you have to stop doing that, and we load on some of these enormous and fascinating projects [like the SSC and the space station], then the money has to come from somewhere, " he says. "It can't come out of whole cloth. And it's just not productive for scientists to say, `That project is okay as long as it doesn't cut into my budget.' "That's a game that's no longer practical."

Federal Science Support Keeps On Rising, But So Do Complaints About Underfunding

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