Good FY 2001 Request for NSF Predicted Amidst Signs of Changing Budget Rules
President Clinton will deliver a speech today at the California Institute of Technology that will outline the administration’s science and technology program in the next fiscal year. The White House has already announced that it will seek a one billion-dollar increase in the budget for the National Institutes of Health.
There has been considerable speculation during the last few weeks that the administration will request a sizeable increase in the National Science Foundation FY 2001 budget. Figures ranging upwards from 10% have been cited in a number of publications, with most reports saying that the requested increase will be several hundred million dollars. NSF’s current budget is $3.9 billion. One publication said that NSF Director Rita Colwell met with President Clinton to request a sizeable increase in her agency’s budget. Colwell addressed the American Astronomical Society meeting last week, at which she said, “You may have seen some of the news reports about the Clinton Administration’s proposed budget for 2001. We all know the old saying that you shouldn’t believe everything you read. But this is one time when you can believe a good part of what you’re reading. I’ll just ask you to stay tuned for more.”
The White House sends its FY 2001 budget request to Congress on Monday, February 7. In addition to his speech today in California, Clinton gives his State of the Union on January 27. Published reports say that Clinton and Vice President Gore’s staff decided that the FY 2001 budget will provide for a significant science initiative. This initiative, reportedly including a $3 billion increase in S&T spending, is to include Nanotechnology, information technology, supercomputers, and health care. Last month, Clinton declared “If we want our current prosperity to continue into the 21st century, we must clearly continue to encourage the creation and spread of new technologies in our economy.” In this same speech, Clinton advocated a “balanced research portfolio,” saying “advances in health care, for example, are often dependent on breakthroughs in other disciplines, such as the physics needed for medical imaging technology.”
This interconnectedness between medical research and other disciplines was described in the White House announcement on the FY 2001 NIH budget request. The additional $1 billion will be used in part to “foster interdisciplinary research,” the announcement stating: “New funds will be used to develop and expand competitive grant programs to encourage researchers in fields such as mathematics, physics, and computer science to contribute to medical research and develop new ways to effectively manage data to maximize the scientific discoveries that will spring from new biological information.”
The Administration and Congress will work on the FY 2001 budget in a changed environment. Within the next few days, the Congressional Budget Office is expected to predict a $2 trillion surplus in the federal government’s budget over the next ten years. This calculation would not include the surplus generated by Social Security. While this calculation includes a number of important assumptions, it changes the climate in which the FY 2001 request will be considered. Congress and the administration are moving away from the caps that have constrained budgets in the past. The current budget is about $37 billion over the ceiling, with most of the excess made possible by designating it as “emergency” or as advanced spending. Last month, a senior Senate appropriations staffer said “We ought to stop kidding ourselves about these caps and just adjust them to reflect reality.” The administration and Congress seem poised to do so. While there will many battles about how much federal spending should be increased in FY 2001, a clear sign of how much things have changed is the goal of both President Clinton and House Speaker Dennis Hastert (R-IL) to eliminate the federal debt by 2015.
