Reviewing Congress' Final Appropriations For 1994, Scientists Eye Future Funding With Cautious Optimism

Scientists Eye Future Funding With Cautious Optimism Author: BARTON REPPERT Date: January 24, 1994, p.1 Despite dramatic cuts in several programs, observers perceive Congress as generally supportive of research Despite severe reduction in United States government support of large-scale science proj-ects and a number of general research areas for 1994, officials at scientific associations and major research universities say they are optimistic--although "cautiously" or "guardedly" so--about the prospects for fiscal 1995. At the same time, some science budget-watchers warn that the research community will face a tough fight--in view of government-wide spending constraints--to maintain even the modest funding increases in the FY94 budget and to stave off further major-program cutbacks at the National Science Foundation and other agencies. They cite, for example, the continued downsizing of the National Aeronautics and Space Administration's space station and the total elimination of funding for the Department of Energy's superconducting supercollider (SSC) as examples of big-science projects that fell victim to these economic forces in the 1994 budget. "The simple fact is that the budget crunch is intense and it's going to continue," says Roland W. Schmitt, chairman of the American Institute of Physics, an umbrella organization of 10 physics-related scientific societies based in College Park, Md. Schmitt is also a member of the National Science Board, which oversees NSF. For the second year in a row, policy-making officials at the National Science Foundation are faced with toughly worded guidance from a Senate subcommittee that wants to see concrete progress soon in shifting NSF toward greater emphasis on supporting "strategic research." Some in the academic research community view the Senate panel's language as a highly unwelcome attempt to "micromanage" NSF and dictate specific areas of scientific inquiry. Other observers, however, say that--semantic differences aside--they share many of the subcommittee's espoused aims for research and can learn to live with the policy guidelines. The language at issue was crafted by a Senate appropriations subcommittee chaired by Sen. Barbara A. Mikulski (D-Md.) and published in a report accompanying the appropriations bill that included fiscal 1994 funding for the NSF. Overall, the report said, NSF "is at a crossroads in its future.... In short, the foundation can be at the heart of helping to shape the administration's science and technology policy in pursuit of specific national goals, or it can diminish into becoming nothing more than a national endowment for science." The subcommittee contends that NSF and the National Science Board have given "mixed signals" as to whether they intend to actually work toward implementing the "bold vision" that was sketched out in the November 1992 report of the Commission on the Future of the NSF. "It is time for the foundation to move beyond rhetorical statements about the value of strategic research or the importance of using science for the transfer of knowledge and technology," the Senate report stated. "That, in the committee's view, is a fact of life and political reality.... The agency must spell out how much of its mission should clearly be strategic and applied in nature, and then implement these parameters through its budget process." The Mikulski subcommittee warns that if NSF fails to do that, "future federal R&D budgets should instead be allocated more generously to agencies such as the National Institute of Standards and Technology, NASA, the national energy labs, or the National Institutes of Health, all of whom seem poised to pursue critical technologies with entrepreneurial vigor and enthusiasm." In its report issued last September, the Senate panel calls on NSF officials to revise the foundation's strategic plan for the 1995 fiscal year to incorporate various specific changes. They need to take steps, the subcommittee says, to ensure that "not less than 60 percent of the agency's annual program research activities should be strategic in nature." Robert Park, public affairs director for the American Physical Society, asserts that "the Senate report language attempts to micromanage the foundation." He calls the latest Mikulski subcommittee report, compared with one issued the year before, "much more aggressively worded." Kathleen Ream, head of the department of government relations and science policy at the American Chemical Society, comments that "there is a concern about the ultimate direction in which the Senate appropriations [subcommittee report] seemed to be pushing the foundation." She says the issue over strategic research poses the question of whether that involves just "categorizing basic research," or instead "dictating what can be done." Cornelius J. Pings, president of the Association of American Universities (AAU), says he also is somewhat concerned about the Mikulski subcommittee report, but doesn't want to see the academic research community get overly worried about it. "I'm concerned about the language," he says. "And many of us were left trying to understand what really the rationale and the intent is, and what the follow-on implications would be. One fear might be that it portends micromanagement"-- although Pings adds that he himself doesn't see in the subcommittee report such micromanaging of NSF. "I hope that we all don't get too stirred up here on something that may, after the fact, appear only to have been a semantic difference," says the AAU president. Pings notes that "much of our work in basic research in this country is directed in the sense that it is concentrated in certain areas. That's been a political decision" by Congress and federal funding agencies, and that "furthermore, we know that that work supports outcomes in technology and applications. What we want to make sure of is that we let it be an outcome--not that we overdirect it going in." NSF officials point out that a substantial portion of the agency's research funding already goes to areas that are considered strategic--such as high-performance computing and communications, advanced materials, and biotechnology. One NSF official, speaking on condition of anonymity, calls Mikulski an "activist" subcommittee chairwoman who, with her staff, "wrote that language to get [the academic research community's] attention, and she sure as heck did." Within the agency, this official says, NSF policymakers view the latest Mikulski report as "telling us to continue to do the difficult job of setting priorities.... It doesn't mean abandon anthropology. It does mean, though, that high- performance computing ought to have high priority." With the United States research community, he says, this means that "you're going to have to be in there scrambling, showing that you are relevant, you are going to be serving the national interest.... I think it's going to be a very hard sell that you've got to put forth. But I think there are ways of doing it." Schmitt, former president of Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, says the budget for fiscal year 1995, to be proposed by President Clinton early next month, pre-sents a "mixed picture." It will be "really tough because of the total budgetary pressures," he says, while on the other hand "I don't think the science is going to be singled out-- people coming after it harder than anything else." For the 1994 fiscal year, final appropriations for which were approved late last fall, Congress provided NSF with a total appropriation of $3.028 billion--$152 million less than the Clinton administration's budget request, but an increase of 10.7 percent over the preceding year's figure. The research portion of NSF's funding went up 7.5 percent to $1.998 billion, while money for education programs increased by 16.8 percent, up to $570 million, and funds for laboratories and instrumentation jumped by 120 percent, up to $110 million. In providing for the National Institutes of Health, the legislators voted a total of $10.956 billion--$288 million more than the Clinton administration had requested, and an increase of 6.1 percent from fiscal 1993. Funding for NIH's National Center for Human Genome Research climbed by 21.3 percent to $129 million. Receiving the biggest increase for fiscal 1994 was the National Institute of Standards and Technology, for which Congress appropriated $520 million--up by 35.4 percent from the year before. This move reflected strong support from the White House and on Capitol Hill for expanding applied research to help enhance the global competitiveness of American industry. On the big-science front, Congress sent shock waves rippling through U.S. high-energy physics by voting to kill the multibillion-dollar SSC under construction in Texas. Also, it chopped back fiscal 1994 funding for the space station by 8.3 percent, to a level of $1.946 billion. After the dust had settled from the congressional actions last summer and fall, the Council of Scientific Society Presidents (CSSP) drew up a "statement on science priorities," which it has submitted to the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy and other agencies. The council is an umbrella group bringing together the heads of about 60 scientific societies, with a combined membership of some 1.3 million. The CSSP consensus statement said federal policy should emphasize the importance of "foundational" research by "continuing to devote a large part of the NSF and NIH budgets to the pursuit of foundational knowledge in the sciences and a substantial part of R&D budgets of the mission-oriented agencies to similar pursuits in areas relevant to them." Among other steps, the statement called for efforts to "increase international cooperation and multinational funding for major, costly, large science projects." Lack of more substantial international cost-sharing was one factor cited by opponents of the SSC. Schmitt, who helped to draft the CSSP statement, says that while cancellation of the supercollider was a "devastating blow" to the high-energy physics community, the project's fate "had become a political issue more than anything anyway. I don't know that [the SSC vote] has any great significance for the future support of pioneering or fundamental science." Robert Park, Washington, D.C.-based public affairs director for the American Physical Society, says about the research funding situation: "We seemed to do well, I think, in the NSF budget--as well as could be expected in these hard times." He observes that "we would have preferred to see the space station program canceled, instead of the supercollider. But ... the NSF came out of the year fairly healthy, though we remain concerned about the Senate report language that accompanied that appropriation." Park is referring to a Senate appropriations subcommittee's report that--in blunt language that has rankled some in the academic research community--calls on the foundation to make sure that more of its resources go to fund "strategic research" targeted at high-priority national needs (see story on page 7). Park, who is also a professor of physics at the University of Maryland, College Park, says in looking ahead to the next budget year: "I'm cautiously optimistic." Clifford Gabriel, executive director of the Washington, D.C.-based American Institute of Biological Sciences, also looks on the bright side when commenting about the past year's action on Capitol Hill: "It could have been a lot worse. I think NIH did well. With [the U.S. Department of Agriculture], their grant program received a modest increase--that's something that I think needs continued growth. NSF did reasonably well. They got a lot of support in their instrumentation and facilities programs." Overall, Gabriel says, "I'm generally pleased with how things came out last year. And if we could see something even close this year [for fiscal 1995 appropriations], that would be an accomplishment." Gar Kaganowich, public affairs director for the Federation of American Societies for Experimental Biology (FASEB), headquartered in Bethesda, Md., notes that his organization had recommended $11.75 billion for NIH in fiscal 1994--a boost of 13.6 percent. "It was helpful to see the 6.1 percent increase that we did get.... We are pleased that we did that well in the current budget environment. But obviously we were a little disappointed that we couldn't move further--closer to the number that we had recommended," he says. According to Kaganowich, FASEB's consensus recommendation for NIH in fiscal 1995 is a total of $11.934 billion, which would amount to an increase of about 8.9 percent. Cornelius J. Pings, president of the Washington, D.C.-based Association of American Universities, which represents major U.S. research universities, gives a qualified yes to the question of whether he is satisfied with the fiscal 1994 appropriations: "overall--and given the context." Pings adds: "There is the capacity to do a lot of good research in this country. And there will be some of my colleagues who say we could have used more [federal funding]. I'm sure that's true. But it's a time of choice, and I think we came out remarkably well." Regarding prospects for NSF and NIH to receive fiscal 1995 increases comparable to this year's, Pings says: "I haven't thought about increments. I think it's a time of great anxiety with that budget for '95--and the next four years, assuming that Congress and the administration stick to the discipline they've imposed upon themselves. There's a severely constrained resource ... if anything increases, something has to decrease." The fiscal 1994 appropriations for NSF and NIH were a pleasant surprise, says Judith Argon, director of the office of research support at Duke University in Durham, N.C.: "I think we were much more encouraged than we thought we were going to be, particularly with NIH, where the increases were larger ... than we were led to expect." Also, she calls the move to more than double NSF funding for academic research facilities and instrumentation "an enormously positive step.... We'd love to see that kind of program at NIH." Looking ahead to the 1995 budget, Argon says, "I would say we're guardedly optimistic." However, the Duke official adds that "there are certainly movements--within both NIH and NSF--to see more of the funds directed toward specific initiatives.... We worry that there will be programs that will be underfunded that we've traditionally drawn support from. We'll need to watch that and try to work with those two agencies and with the Congress." The NSF budget's boost to $110 million for academic research infrastructure is "an extremely good start" toward a multiyear effort to fund badly needed facilities and instrumentation, says Norman Scott, vice president for research at Cornell University in Ithaca, N.Y. "Cornell is anxiously putting proposals together at this time to compete for those funds," he says. Alvin Kwiran, vice provost for research at the University of Washington in Seattle, says he believes that with the fiscal 1994 funding levels, "the research enterprise in the universities did remarkably well, given all the constraints on the federal budget." According to Kwiran, the University of Washington last year had a research budget totaling approximately $430 million-- with about 80 percent of the funds coming from federal sources. Kwiran says he expects to see continuing debate about the overall direction and longer-term goals of research in the United States. But he observes that "assuming no serious downturns in the economy, or no untoward events, I'm optimistic that science will continue to be funded respectably." The research administrator adds that "the big factor, of course, in recent years has been the explosive growth in the big-science projects. The decision on the SSC in some ways is extremely painful to those directly engaged in it--but probably inevitable, given the spiraling costs of that project and the budget constraints that the country faces." Fred W. Weingarten, executive director of the Washington, D.C.-based Computing Research Association, notes that Congress trimmed back fiscal 1994 funding for high- performance computing and communications programs--by $12 million at NSF and by about $40 million at the Pentagon's Advanced Research Projects Agency. These cuts came even though the Clinton administration has strongly endorsed efforts to develop the "national information infrastructure." Federal Research Funding (In Millions of Dollars) FY '93FY '94 requestFY '94 approp. National Science Foundation 2,734 3,180 3,028 National Institutes of Health10,326 10,668 10,956 Department of Energy -- Superconducting supercollider 517 640 --- -- Other civilian research2,626 2,7302,765 National Aeronautics and Space Admin. -- Space station 2,1221,9461,946 -- Other R&D 8,8479,529 9,284 National Institute of Standards & Technology 384 533 520 Environmental Protection Agency (R&D) 323 354 339 National Oceanic & Atmospheric Admin 202 214 226 Dept. of Agriculture ...National Research Initiative 97 130 112 Looking to the next budget go-round, Weingarten says: "We've got a tough fight. We're going to have to make our case. We've got some heavyweights on our side, and we think we've got good arguments. But we've got to be realistic, too.... There's only a limited number of times in which politicians will stick their necks out and defend you." Peter Boyce, executive officer of the American Astronomical Society, also based in Washington, has some reservations about the fiscal 1994 appropriations. "The money for NSF was very heartening," he says, but in the final budget for NASA- -in which, aside from the space station cutback, R&D funds increased by 4.9 percent, up to $9.284 billion--"there are a couple of things which really give us pause." One particular area of concern, he says, was the scrapping by Congress of NASA's High-Resolution Microwave Survey, the radio astronomy program that had previously been known as the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence (SETI). "They canceled it and they saved $12 million," Boyce says. "And it was done with a lot of demagoguery--no consideration of where the program was, how well it had met its goals ... and the fact that after planning and work for 10 years, the search was just starting." Boyce adds that he doubts any funding can be restored for the program in fiscal 1995. "It's just too much of a fight," he says. "It's too tempting a target for people to use to grab headlines." Barton Reppert is a freelance science writer based in Gaithersburg, Md.

Reviewing Congress' Final Appropriations For 1994, Scientists Eye Future Funding With Cautious Optimism

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