Debt Limit Deal Sets Up Stagnant Funding for Science

Republicans and Democrats are lining up votes in Congress this week to pass an agreement that President Biden and House Speaker Kevin McCarthy (R-CA) forged over the weekend to lift the national debt limit and cap federal spending. If enacted, the agreement will hold the federal non-defense discretionary budget essentially flat in fiscal year 2024 and limit it to a 1% increase in fiscal year 2025, and the debt limit will be taken out of play until sometime in 2025.

Since most science programs are funded through discretionary spending, the agreement means any increases they receive will generally have to be paid for with cuts elsewhere. For that reason, appropriations likely will fall well behind the budget targets set out in last year’s CHIPS and Science Act and any increases would be focused on the highest-priority programs and projects.

The agreement does not affect the multiyear funding already appropriated through the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act, the Inflation Reduction Act, and the semiconductor provisions of the CHIPS and Science Act.

Biden administration officials are arguing that the outcome is probably similar to what Republicans and Democrats would have negotiated to finalize fiscal year 2024 appropriations later this year. Notably, the two years of caps set by the agreement are much less than the decade of caps put in place following a debt-limit standoff early in the Obama administration, meaning the next presidential election will have more direct implications for the future direction of spending than the 2012 election did.

In the near term, the agreement means appropriators will have firm guidelines to follow when formulating their fiscal year 2024 spending proposals, and the drafts they release in the coming weeks will give a stronger indication of final outcomes than those released during the past two budget cycles, for which spending limits were not agreed on until late in negotiations.

Because disagreements on overarching spending levels are typically among the main impediments to finalizing spending legislation, the agreement may also expedite enactment of fiscal year 2024 budgets.