Although the federal science and technology budget is expected to shrink in the coming years, one of the largest federal R&D programs should continue to thrive: Congress took action last month to extend the $2.3 billion Small Business Innovation Research program for six years. The SBIR’s reauthorization will increase from 2.5% to 3.2% the amount of money that goes to small businesses from the so-called extramural—that is, externally performed—R&D budgets of 11 federal agencies. But it will also shrink the amount of money available for universities, the major external performers of federal basic research.
The agencies participating in the SBIR program range in size from the Department of Defense and the National Institutes of Health, which handed out SBIR grants totaling $1.2 billion and $616 million, respectively, in fiscal year 2010, to the Environmental Protection Agency, which issued $4.8 million in grants that year. Taken together, the SBIR programs are...
