AAAS Statement on Impact of R&D Funding Cuts

In the ongoing dialogue over competing congressional and administration budget proposals, an important number to the science community is the amount that federal research and development funding would be cut to achieve a balanced budget by the year 2002. Based on the balanced budget resolution passed by Congress last June, the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) estimated that non-military research and development funding would, by 2002, be reduced by one-third from its FY 1995 level. This projection has been employed often in the budget debates. However, appropriations for FY 1996 have not followed the original course set by the budget resolution. AAAS noted that any deviations from the budget resolution would affect projections for future years.

A reference to AAAS’s estimates by former Presidential Science Advisor Frank Press at a February 28 House Science Committee hearing on R&D funding (see FYI #35) prompted Albert Teich, AAAS Director for Science and Policy Programs, to make the following statement on March 5:

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“Frank Press’s statement in last week’s Science Committee hearing on `Allocating Federal Funds for Science and Technology’ that `AAAS may be backing off from the 30 percent’ projected cut in R&D funding has led to some confusion as to the status of this widely-cited number. “The 30 percent (actually 33 percent) cut in nondefense R&D by FY 2002 comes from the AAAS analysis of last spring’s congressional budget resolution. It is a projection based on the information and plans outlined in that budget resolution. There is a table on the AAAS website that shows in detail how we arrived at this number. The URL for AAAS’s R&D page is http://www.aaas.org/spp/dspp/rd/rdwwwpg.htm ; versions of the table for several different browsers are available under the heading `Projected Effects of Budget Resolution on Nondefense R&D (July 95).’ We stood behind it then and we stand behind it now -- as an analysis of the implications of the FY 1996 budget resolution. “The FY 96 appropriations that have been passed since last spring suggest that Congress is treating R&D (especially basic research at NIH and NSF) more favorably than had been indicated in the budget resolution. This might mean that the outcome in FY 2002 will be not be a 30 (or 33) percent reduction. On the other hand, Congress and the President still intend to reach a balanced budget in seven years, so it may just mean that larger cuts in R&D are yet to come.

“We won’t really know what the outyears look like until we see another budget resolution or similar outyear projections in the President’s budget. When we have those numbers in hand, we will analyze them and publish our findings. In the meantime, the FY 96 budget resolution, approved by Congress, though obviously overtaken by subsequent events, still remains the only detailed outyear plan for nondefense R&D programs from either Congress or the President and we stand behind our analysis of it.”