National Academies Report Warns of Unbalanced Research Funding

“Continuing the current distribution of appropriations could distort the nation’s research portfolio with adverse long-term consequences for our country,” states a new report from the National Academies of Sciences and Engineering and the Institute of Medicine. The 14-page report produced by the Committee on Science, Engineering, and Public Policy adds to what is becoming a topic being discussed more publicly in Washington the imbalance of research funding.

The report looks at a different slice of the federal research pie, what it calls the federal science and technology (FS&T) portion of the annual R&D request. In the FY 2000 submission, this is about $49 billion of the $78 billion over-all R&D request. The report characterizes this FS&T budget as “the portion of the federal research and development budget that is aimed at investment in the creation of new knowledge and technologies.” FS&T is defined more precisely as “the civilian and noncivilian research budgets for all agencies (including 6.1 and 6.2 at DOD) and the development budget for all agencies except DOD and DOE. For the development budget of the latter two agencies, only DOD 6.3 budget categories and the equivalent activities of the DOE atomic-energy defense programs are included in the FS&T budget. In addition, the FS&T budget includes R&D facilities and major capital equipment for R&D.”

Looking at spending in constant dollars from FY 1994 to FY 2000, the committee calculated the following changes:

FS&T excluding NIH: down 5.7 percent.

FS&T including NIH: up 3.3 percent.

Department of Defense FS&T: down 19.8 percent.

Department of Energy FS&T: flat.

National Science Foundation FS&T: up 15.8 percent.

NIH FS&T: up 31.2 percent.

The committee analyzed the decline in spending in physical sciences, and its consequences. It found, “From FY 1993 to FY 1998, federal obligations for research in the physical sciences decreased by 11.2 percent in constant dollars and for engineering increased by only 0.4 percent. It appears that budgets for mission agencies for FY 1999 and FY 2000 would continue this trend.” The report later states, “Funding for the physical sciences relies heavily on DOD, NASA, and DOE, which together provide 33 percent of the federal funding for basic research. Additionally, DOD provides a large fraction of all computer science research funding and graduate education support. Because of its relatively small size, increases at NSF cannot compensate for the significant decreases at DOD or the other mission agencies. The downward trend at DOD could lead to a gradual erosion of such fields of research as the physical sciences and engineering, thus weakening the research enterprise.”

The report concludes, “The nation must recognize the importance of investing in a balanced way across a broad range of fields to maintain the overall health of the science and technology portfolio. Recent increases in NSF funding cannot begin to compensate for the declines in funding of mission agencies. Such an unbalanced investment strategy will undermine two primary goals of our national research enterprise: that the United States perform at least at world-class levels in all major fields of science and engineering and that the United States should seek preeminence in a select number of fields.”

The report can be accessed at http://pompeii.nap.edu/books/0309064872/html/index.html