From the Hill – Fall 2014
Budget discussions inch forward
Congress returned to Washington in September to do a little business before heading home to campaign. As usual at this time of year, there’s still quite a bit of work to do to complete the budget process for fiscal year (FY) 2015, which begins October 1. Senate Appropriations Chair Barbara Mikulski (D-MD) remains interested in a September omnibus bill that would package all or several bills into one, but the odds seem to favor the House Republicans’ preference for a continuing resolution until the new Congress takes office.
With all this uncertainty, it’s hard to say when appropriations will be finalized and what they will be. Nevertheless, enough discussion and preliminary action have taken place to provide a general picture of congressional preferences for R&D funding in FY 2015. The Senate committees have prepared budgets for the six largest R&D spending bills, which account for 97% of all federal R&D, but none of these budgets have cleared the full Senate. House committees have prepared budgets for all the major categories except the Labor, Health and Human Services (HHS), and Education bill [including the National Institutes of Health (NIH)]. The full House has approved the Defense (DOD); Energy and Water; and Commerce, Justice, and Science [which includes the National Science Foundation (NSF), national Aeronautics and Space Administration, National Institute of Standards and Technology, and National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration] appropriations bills.
So far, according to AAAS estimates, current House R&D appropriations, which do not include NIH, would result in a 0.8% increase from FY 2014 in nominal dollars; current Senate appropriations for the same agencies would result in just a 0.1% increase. With the Labor-HHS bill included, the Senate appropriation would result in a 0.7% increase. All of these figures would be reductions in constant dollars.
Most R&D spending has followed essentially the same trajectory in recent years. After a sharp decline with sequestration in FY 2013, budgets experienced at least a partial recovery in FY 2014 and seem likely to have a small inflation-adjusted decline in FY 2015. There has been some notable variation. Funding for health, environmental, and education research has made less progress in returning to pre-sequester levels. Defense science and technology (S&T) spending neared pre-sequester levels in FY 2014 but seems likely to fall short of that mark in FY 2015. Downstream technology development funding at DOD would remain well below FY 2012 levels.
In the aggregate, FY 2015 R&D appropriations are not terribly far apart in the House and Senate. This is a departure from what happened in developing the FY 2014 budget, when the House and Senate differed on overall discretionary spending levels. This difference led to large discrepancies in R&D appropriations. The conflict over discretionary spending was resolved in last December’s Bipartisan Budget Act, and this agreement has led to the relatively similar R&D appropriations being produced by each chamber for FY 2015.
This is consistent with the idea that the primary determinant of the R&D budget is the size of the overall discretionary budget. However, it is also worth noting that the very modest nominal increase in aggregate R&D spending would still be larger than the 0.2% nominal growth projected for the total discretionary budget. Indeed, R&D in the five major nondefense bills listed above would generally beat this pace by a clear margin in both chambers, suggesting that appropriators with limited fiscal flexibility have prioritized science and innovation to some extent.
Under current appropriations, federal R&D would continue to stagnate as a share of the economy, as it would under the president’s original budget request (excluding the proposed but largely ignored Opportunity, Growth, and Security Initiative). Federal R&D, which represented 1.04% of gross domestic product (GDP) in FY 2003 at the end of the NIH budget doubling, is now below 0.8%. Both current appropriations and the president’s request would place it at about 0.75% of GDP in FY 2015. Research alone, excluding development, has declined from 0.47% of GDP in FY 2003 to 0.39% today, and current proposals would take it a bit lower, to about 0.37%.
Even though final decisions for FY 2015 appropriations are still some months away, agencies are already at work on their budget proposals for FY 2016. The administration released a set of memos outlining science and technology (S&T) priorities for the FY 2016 budget, due in February. Priorities include: advanced manufacturing; clean energy; earth observations; global climate change; information technology and high-performance computing; innovation in life sciences, biology, and neuroscience; national and homeland security; and R&D for informed policymaking and management.
Congress tackles administrative burden
In response to a March 2014 National Science Board (NSB) report on how some federal rules and regulations were placing an unnecessary burden on research institutions, the House Science, Space, and Technology Committee’s oversight and research panels held a joint hearing on June 12 on Reducing Administrative Workload for Federally Funded Research. The witnesses, including Arthur Bienenstock, the chairman of the NSB’s Task Force on Administrative Burdens; Susan Wyatt Sedwick, the president of the Federal Demonstration Partnership (FDP) Foundation; Gina Lee-Glauser, the vice president of research at Syracuse University; and Allison Lerner, the inspector general of NSF, represented stakeholders affected by changes in the oversight of federally funded research.
Concern over investigators’ administrative burdens began in 2005 when an FDP report revealed that federally funded investigators spend an average of 42% of their time on administrative tasks, dealing with a panoply of regulations in areas such as conflict of interest, research integrity, human subjects protections, animal care and use, and disposal of hazardous wastes. Despite federal reform efforts, in 2012 the FDP found that the average time spent on “meeting requirements rather than conducting research” remained at 42%. In response, the NSB convened a task force charged with investigating this issue and developing recommendations for reform.
On March 29, 2013, the task force issued a request for information (RFI) in the Federal Register, inviting “principal investigators with Federal research funding … to identify Federal agency and university requirements that contribute most to their administrative workload and to offer recommendations for reducing that workload.” The task force used responses from the RFI and information collected at three roundtables with investigators and administrators to write its report.
During the June hearing, the witnesses discussed the report’s recommendations. The four main recommendations were for policymakers to focus on the science, eliminate or modify ineffective regulations, harmonize and streamline requirements, and increase university efficiency and effectiveness.
Bienenstock of the NSB spoke about the report’s tangible suggestions, which include changing NSF’s proposal guidelines to require in the initial submission only the information necessary to determine whether a research project merits funding, deferring ancillary materials not critical to merit review; adopting a system like the FDP’s pilot project in payroll certification to replace time-consuming and outdated effort reporting; and establishing a permanent high-level interagency committee to address obsolete regulations and discuss new ones.
Sedwick echoed the usefulness of the FDP’s payroll-certification pilot and noted that the FDP is a perfect forum for testing new reporting mechanisms that could lead to a more efficient research enterprise. In her testimony, Lee-Glauser addressed how the ever more competitive funding environment is taking investigators away from their research for increasing periods of time to write grants, and noted that the current framework for regulating research on human subjects is too stringent for the low-risk social and behavioral research being performed at Syracuse University. Inspector General Lerner, championing the auditing process, spoke about the importance of using labor-effort reports to prevent fraud and noted that the Office of Management and Budget is in the process of auditing the FDP’s payroll-certification pilot project to determine its effectiveness and scalability. She also mentioned that even though requiring receipts only for large purchases made with grant money would be less time-consuming, it would not prevent investigators from committing fraud by making many small purchases. Lerner closed by reminding the room that “acceptance of public money brings with it a responsibility to uphold the public’s trust.” In addition to the payroll-certification pilot, a few other changes are in the works that could implement some of the recommendations in the NSB report. Currently, the NSF Division of Integrative Organismal Systems and Division of Environmental Biology are piloting a pre-proposal program that requires only a one-page summary and five-page project description for review.
On July 8, the House addressed the issue with its passage of the Research and Development Efficiency Act (H.R. 5056), a bipartisan bill introduced by Rep. Larry Bucshon (R-IN), which would establish a working group through the administration’s National Science and Technology Council to make recommendations on streamlining federal regulations affecting research.
– Keizra Mecklai
In brief
The House passed several S&T bills in July. These include the Department of Energy Laboratory Modernization and Technology Transfer Act (H.R. 5120), which would establish a pilot program for commercializing technology; a two-year reauthorization (H.R. 5035) for the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST), which would authorize funding for NIST at $856 million for FY 2015; the International Science and Technology Cooperation Act (H.R. 5029), which would establish a body under the National Science and Technology Council to coordinate international science and technology cooperative research and training activities and partnerships; the STEM Education Act (H.R. 5031), which would support existing science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) education programs at NSF and define STEM to include computer science; and the National Windstorm Impact Reduction Act (H.R. 1786) to reauthorize the National Windstorm Impact Reduction Program. The House rejected a modified version of the Securing Energy Critical Elements and American Jobs Act of 2014 (H.R. 1022), which would authorize $25 million annually from FY 2015 to FY 2019 to support a Department of Energy R&D program for energy-critical elements.
Members of the Senate, led by Sen. John D. Rockefeller (D-WV), chair of the Senate Commerce, Science, and Transportation Committee, have released their own America COMPETES reauthorization bill. The bill would authorize significant multiyear funding increases for NSF and NIST, while avoiding the changes to NSF peer review and the cuts to social science funding proposed by the House Science Committee in the Frontiers in Innovation, Research, Science, and Technology (FIRST) Act. With the short legislative calendar, progress on the bill is unlikely in the near term.
On July 25, the House Science, Space, and Technology Committee approved the Revitalize American Manufacturing and Innovation Act (H.R. 2996), which would establish a network of public/private institutes focusing on innovation in advanced manufacturing, involving both industry and academia. The creation of such a network has long been a goal of the administration, and a handful of pilot institutes have already been established. A companion bill (S. 1468) awaits action in the Senate.
On July 16, eight Senators, including Environment and Public Works Committee Ranking Member John Barrasso (R-WY), introduced a companion bill (S. 2613) to the House Secret Science Reform Act (H.R. 4012), which passed the House Science, Space, and Technology Committee along party lines on June 24. The bill would prohibit the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) from proposing, finalizing, or disseminating regulations or assessments unless all underlying data were reproducible and made publicly available.
On June 26, Sens. Kirsten Gillibrand (D-NY) and Daniel Coats (R-IN) introduced the Technology and Research Accelerating National Security and Future Economic Resiliency (TRANSFER) Act (S. 2551). The legislation, a companion to a House bill (H.R. 2981) originally introduced last year by Reps. Chris Collins (R-NY) and Derek Kilmer (D-WA), would create a funding program within the Small Business Technology Transfer program, “to accelerate the commercialization of federally-funded research.” The grants would support efforts such as proof of concept of translational research, prototype construction, and market research.
The Department of Energy Research and Development Act (H.R. 4869), introduced in the House by Rep. Cynthia Lummis (R-WY) on June 13, would authorize a 5.1% budget increase over the FY 2014 level for the Office of Science and 14.3% cut in the Advanced Research Projects Agency–Energy budget. In the subcommittee’s summary, Section 115 “directs the Director to carry out a program on biological systems science prioritizing fundamental research on biological systems and genomics science and requires the Government Accountability Office (GAO) to identify duplicative climate science initiatives across the federal government. Section 115 limits the Director from approving new climate science-related initiatives unless the Director makes a determination that such work is unique and not duplicative of work by other federal agencies. This section also requires the Director to cease all climate science-related initiatives identified as duplicative in the GAO assessment unless the Director determines such work to be critical to achieving American energy independence.”
Executive actions support Obama’s science agenda
In an effort to circumvent a deadlocked Congress, President Obama has issued a number of executive actions to advance his science policy goals. After the DREAM Act immigration bill stalled in 2012, the President issued the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals, which allows undocumented individuals in the United States to become eligible for employment authorization (though not permanent residency) if they were under age 31 on June 15, 2012; arrived in the United States before turning 16 years of age; have lived in the United States since June 15, 2007; and are currently in school or hold a GED or higher degree, among other requirements. This step toward immigration reform may allow undocumented residents with STEM degrees or careers to stay in the country and continue to support the American STEM workforce. Then, in 2013, once again in response to failed legislation and the tragic shooting in Newtown, CT, Obama took action on gun control. Among other things, he lifted what amounted to a ban on federally funded research about the causes of gun violence.
Most recently, the EPA released a proposed rule to reduce carbon emissions by 30% below 2005 levels by 2030, as directed by the President’s executive actions contained in his Climate Action Plan. The rule would allow each state to implement a plan that works best for its economy and energy mix, and has been a source of controversy on Capitol Hill; members of Congress and other stakeholders are already engaged in a heated debate as to whether the EPA has authority (through the Clean Air Act) to regulate greenhouse gas emissions.
Agency updates
On July 23, U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) Secretary Tom Vilsack announced the creation of the Foundation for Food and Agricultural Research (FFAR) to facilitate the support of agriculture research through both public and private funding. FFAR, authorized in the 2014 Farm Bill, will be funded at $200 million and must receive matching funds from nonfederal sources when making awards for research.
NIH is teaming up with NSF to launch I-Corps at NIH, a pilot program based on NSF’s Innovation Corps. The program will allow researchers with Small Business Innovation Research and Small Business Technology Transfer (SBIR/STTR) Phase 1 awards, which establish feasibility or proof of concept for technologies that could be commercialized, to enroll in a training program that helps them explore potential markets for their innovations.
In response to the June 16 National Academies report on the National Children’s Study, a plan by NIH to study the health of 100,000 U.S. babies up to age 21, NIH Director Francis Collins decided to put the ambitious study, which has already faced more than a decade of costly delays, on hold. The Academies panel indicated that the study’s hypotheses should be more scientifically robust and that the study would benefit from more scientific expertise and management. It also recommended changes to the subject recruitment process.
“From the Hill” is adapted from the newsletter Science and Technology in Congress, published by the Office of Government Relations of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (www.aaas.org) in Washington, DC.