With a truce declared on partisan budget wrangling, the fiscal year 2014 budget process quietly concluded in January with mainly modest increases to federal R&D programs compared with FY 2013 levels. A deal struck in December between House and Senate budget committees produced an overall spending cap that paved the way for congressional appropriators to produce an omnibus funding bill and avert a second round of across-the-board spending cuts known as sequestration. That same budget agreement also set a spending ceiling for FY 2015, which all but ensures that Congress will follow the normal appropriations process when it considers the administration’s budget, likely to be delivered this month. In 2013 lawmakers resorted to a full-year stopgap continuing resolution, which simply carried over FY 2012 spending.
In most cases the year-to-year increases in R&D for FY 2014 are actually greater than shown in the table on page 29, since the FY...
