Conferees Agree on DOD University Funding; Senate Passes VA/HUD Bill

DOD APPROPRIATIONS BILL:

House and Senate conferees reached agreement September 26 on H.R. 4650, the fiscal year 1995 appropriations bill for the Department of Defense. The accompanying conference report (House Report 103-747) restores most of the funding for university research that the House bill had eliminated.

As reported in FYI #91, chairman John Murtha (D-Pennsylvania) of the House Appropriations Subcommittee on Defense had cut $900 million (or 50 percent) from a request of $1.8 billion for DOD-sponsored university research. After receiving a raft of concerned letters (see FYI #103 for AIP’s letter), the Senate appropriations subcommittee, chaired by Daniel Inouye (D-Hawaii) proposed to cut just $79 million.

In conference, the House and Senate conferees reached a compromise. Under the heading “University Research,” the conference report states, “The conferees agree to provide a total reduction of $200,000,000 [from the $1.8 billion budget request], rather than $900,000,000 as proposed by the House. This reduction is distributed as follows: $13,752,000 is in the Army appropriation, $62,245,000 is in the Navy appropriation, $18,456,000 is in the Air Force appropriation, $86,492,000 is in the Defense-Wide appropriation, and $19,055,000 associated with university laboratories is in section 8054 of the bill.”

Also on the topic of university research, the report continues, “The conferees are concerned about overhead charged by universities to Defense research contracts, particularly the amount that DOD must pay annually to universities for overhead (about $500,000,000) and the variability of overhead rates applied to each institution’s research projects. The conferees direct the Secretary of Defense to submit a report to the Congressional defense committees by February 1, 1995 which outlines the actions the Defense Department plans to take to address these concerns.”

The conference report must now be approved by both chambers of Congress before being sent to the President for signing. The new fiscal year begins on October 1.

VA/HUD/INDEPENDENT AGENCIES APPROPRIATIONS BILL:

In other news on appropriations bills, the Senate yesterday adopted the conference report on the VA/HUD Appropriations bill (H.R. 4624), which provides fiscal year 1995 funding for NSF and NASA (see FYIs #138-142 for report provisions). The House approved the report on September 12.