Request and Funding Trends for Selected Programs, FY 1995-97

Now that the 104th Congress has come and gone, it might be instructive to look at how the funding for selected science and technology programs changed over its two years. Also shown are the changes in President Clinton’s budget requests for these programs over the same two-year period. It is likely that the 104th Congress’s emphasis on balancing the federal budget had an effect on the President’s requests: Clinton, challenged to produce his own plan for ending the deficit, released a fiscal year 1997 budget request that was lower than it might have been otherwise.

The percentage changes below were arrived at by first converting fiscal year 1995 figures to 1997 dollars using a GDP inflator (of 1.042) to adjust for inflation. Then the percent difference in the appropriation or request was calculated from fiscal year 1995 (the last year of the Democratic 103rd Congress) to fiscal year 1997 (the end of the Republican 104th Congress.) The percent difference in the request shows how the Administration’s funding intentions for each program changed over the two years; the percent difference in appropriations shows how each program’s budget actually changed over the same time period. Additionally, the programs are ranked by how well they did for each column.

*For the first time, in FY 1997, both the request and the appropriation for NSF’s R&RA account included $50 million for Academic Research Infrastructure. Prior to this, ARI was a separate account.

**The FY1995 appropriations for NIST are pre-rescission figures.