Senate Report Language on NSF: Research & Related Activities

Accompanying the Senate version of H.R. 4624, the VA/HUD appropriations bill, is a report providing the Senate Appropriations Committee’s views and recommendations. A section of the report on the National Science Foundation outlines subcommittee chairwoman Barbara Mikulski’s (D-MD) and her colleagues’ views on funding for Research and Related Activities (R&RA). Final funding levels and report language will be decided upon by a conference committee comprised of Members of the House and Senate Appropriations Committees.

“For fiscal year 1995, the Committee recommends an appropriation of $2,300,000,000 for research and related activities of the National Science Foundation. This amount is $301,000,000 above the fiscal year 1994 level, $48,297,000 below the budget request, and $83,077,000 above the House allowance.”

The Committee recommends the following (selected) changes to the budget request:

-$33,000,000 from the global climate change initiative. “In taking this reduction, priority should be given to reducing overhead and facilities costs within the geosciences subactivity. Geosciences currently has the highest proposal success rate of any Foundation subactivity and the highest annualized award size, yet plans for fiscal year 1995 included less than a 1-percent increase in the number of researchers supported, even with the requested 9.7 percent funding increase;" +$15,000,000 for advanced manufacturing technology; +$6,000,000 within the global climate change initiative “to establish, through a competitive process, a center or consortium of centers for the human dimensions of global climate change;" +$2,000,000 “to establish a national center for environmental research with the goal of improving the scientific basis for Government decisionmaking on the environment;" and -$55,797,000 as a general reduction, “taken at the agency’s discretion.... No part of this reduction shall be taken from the activities identified by the Committee that are to be increased above the budget request.”

On the issue of indirect costs, the Committee “concurs with the House in choosing not to implement the 1-year pause in the payment of indirect costs to academic institutions that was proposed by the administration, pending completion of the administration’s comprehensive review of its policy for reimbursement of indirect costs.”

The Committee also concurs with the House recommendation to move unobligated LIGO funds from the current year to the 1995 “Major research equipment” account. Full funding is recommended for the National High Magnetic Field Laboratory, and stable funding for the National Solar Observatory and the National Radio Astronomy Observatory.

Regarding NSF’s system of awards and peer review, the report says: “One of the major recommendations made by the 1992 Commission on the Future of the NSF was that research award sizes should be made large enough to enable research. As part of this effort, the Committee urges the Foundation to achieve a more equitable balance among the directorates in average award sizes and their growth rates by increasing award sizes in those areas where researchers’ buying power has eroded significantly.

“The Committee is concerned by the fact that the Foundation chooses only 5 percent of its expert reviewers from industry, and that only 15 percent of its reviewers are new each year. The Committee directs the Foundation to achieve an average of at least 10 percent of its expert reviewers from industry within the next year, and to use a significantly higher percentage of new reviewers. This is necessary to prevent isolation of university research from its potential user community, to prevent the gradual narrowing of the scope of research programs, to favor risk and innovation over standard approaches, and to give priority to cross-disciplinary proposals in areas that fall between the boundaries of existing programs.”

Additionally, within available resources, the report “urges NSF to provide support for an initiative to strengthen research collaborations between U.S. scientists and engineers and research personnel in the New Independent States. The Committee suggests using supplements to existing NSF awards to enable individuals, groups, and centers to collaborate with counterpart personnel and institutions in the former Soviet Union.”