Obama's 2012 budget would freeze total spending, expand science and technology

It's become a cliché that leaders of the legislative branch declare a budget submitted by a president of the opposition party to be "dead on arrival," but President Obama's fiscal year 2012 proposal could well die early, buried and forgotten before lawmakers begin dealing with the period it covers. Still preoccupied with trying to set final funding levels for FY 2011 with that budget year now half gone, a sharply divided Congress continues to battle over the size of the reductions to make to the appropriation levels they approved for FY 2010. The endpoint of that process is unknown, but the certainty of some reduction bodes ill for the president's proposal to hike nonmilitary R&D funding by $4.1 billion, or 6.5%, in the year yet to come.

With his budget blueprint, Obama holds fast against the headwind of austerity that has swept over the political landscape since the Republican take-over of the House of Representatives last fall. The new crop of budget-cutting lawmakers has repudiated what in the wake of the 2008 financial collapse had been an admittedly uneasy Keynes- ian consensus that vastly increased federal spending was vital in the short term to prevent a total economic meltdown and that deficit reduction had to wait. In presenting the 2012 plan, Obama moves beyond stimulus to argue that science and technology (S&T) are ever more crucial to ensuring that the US can compete with Asian and European nations whose technological capabilities have surged in recent years.

Although his budget would freeze overall federal domestic discretionary spending for the next five years, the president said in his State of the Union speech that increased federal R&D is essential if the US is to "out-innovate, out-educate, and out-build the rest of the world." He likened the country's current situation to the one it faced with the Soviet Union's surprise launch of Sputnik 1 in 1957. "We had no idea how we would beat them to the Moon," he told lawmakers. "The science wasn't even there yet. NASA didn't exist. But after investing in better research and education, we didn't just surpass the Soviets; we unleashed a wave of innovation that created new industries and millions of new jobs."

Overall, the president's 2012 plan requests $147.9 billion for R&D, an increase of $722 million, or less than 1%, from FY 2010 appropriations. The much larger increase for civilian research programs would be offset by a $4 billion reduction of the Department of Defense (DOD) R&D budget, which, at $75.7 billion, still exceeds all nondefense. Obama sought to make a similar cut to DOD R&D in FY 2011. But a federal budget never materialized this year, as lawmakers failed to complete action on any of the appropriations bills. Federal agencies have instead been kept in business so far through a succession of short-term continuing resolutions that provide funding essentially at 2010 levels.

As PHYSICS TODAY went to press, Vice President Biden had joined negotiations between House and Senate leaders to reach a compromise on a long-term continuing resolution to fund the government for the remainder of the current fiscal year. A House-passed bill that would have ordered $61 billion in spending reductions from FY 2010 levels during the six months remaining in FY 2011 was defeated in the Senate. But House leaders continued to press for cuts well in excess of the $4 billion that were enacted in a three-week funding bill that was to expire on 18 March. The House's long-term spending bill would have ordered big cuts in some S&T areas, including the Department of Energy's (DOE's) basic research programs, which would have lost nearly $900 million; NSF, where a $303 million reduction was proposed; and NIST, which would have been decreased $160 million. Such cuts would abruptly end an initiative by President George W. Bush to double annual spending at NSF, at DOE's Office of Science, and in NIST's laboratory programs over a 10-year period ending in 2017. The initiative, which Obama has continued, was explicitly meant to fix an imbalance that had developed as federal basic research in the physical sciences failed to keep pace with a doubling at the National Institutes of Health (NIH) completed in 2002.

In his 2012 plan, Obama proposes a combined increase of $1.5 billion, or 12.2%, for the three agencies and an increase of just over $1 billion, or 3.4%, for NIH. At $31.2 billion, NIH would continue to account for nearly half of the $66.8 billion overall proposed nondefense R&D total.

Absent from the FY 2012 budget numbers is any part of the supplement that the 2009 American Recovery and Reinvestment Act (ARRA) provided for federal R&D programs. More than $23 billion of the $27.7 billion ARRA dished out for R&D went to DOE, the bulk of it devoted to clean-energy programs. The law required that ARRA funds had to be obligated by September 2010. Although DOE has awarded essentially 100% of its ARRA-backed grants and contracts, the funding is parceled out over the term of the grants, not as a lump sum. As of 25 February, DOE reported that about one-third of its ARRA monies have been paid out. That means that economic benefits will continue for months or even years to come.

Despite Obama's commitment to improving the teaching of science, technology, engineering, and mathematics, his 2012 budget would cut total spending for programs in STEM education to $3.4 billion from the $3.7 billion in his 2011 request. A $54 million-per-year program at NSF that puts graduate student fellows to work teaching STEM in K–12 classrooms is one of several programs that would be terminated, to be replaced by new initiatives, including one to train 100 000 new STEM teachers over 10 years. The new program's $80 million training component will be run by the Department of Education, with NSF to fund $20 million of research on teacher preparation.

The budget proposes sizeable increases for some longstanding interagency S&T initiatives. The US Global Change Research Program would increase 20.3%, or $446 million, to $2.6 billion, with NSF's and DOE's components rising the most, by 33% and 31.5%, respectively. The National Nanotechnology Initiative would grow by $201 million, to $2.1 billion, and DOE, with a 63.3% increase to its NNI funding, would become the leading agency, budget-wise, of the nearly one dozen NNI participants. The $611 million DOE component of NNI would eclipse the $496 million proposed for NIH and the $458 million requested at NSF for the initiative. The NNI research program at DOD would decline 16.2% next year, to $368 million.

Department of Energy. Compared with 2010, overall R&D spending at DOE would grow more than 18%, and the Office of Science, home to the department's basic research programs, would climb 9.1%. On 3 March Energy Secretary Steven Chu told the House Committee on Science, Space, and Technology that the House-passed FY 2011 long-term continuing resolution would require reductions of up to 50% in Office of Science programs through the balance of this year, force the shutdown of DOE's scientific user facilities, and necessitate layoffs of many DOE-supported graduate students and postdocs. Raymond Orbach, DOE undersecretary for science under Bush, admonished in an editorial for Science that the House cuts "would relegate the United States to second-class status in the scientific community and threaten economic growth and prosperity for future generations of Americans." Hardest hit would be the Biological and Environmental Research program; House reductions there would all but eliminate three interdisciplinary bioenergy research centers that were created under Orbach in 2007 to develop new, economically viable biofuels from noncrop feedstocks.

For 2012 Obama proposes doubling the number of energy innovation hubs to six. The multidisciplinary research centers are each meant to focus on overarching basic research problems that must be overcome to make major improvements to specific clean energy technologies. The three new hubs will work on batteries and energy storage, smart grid technology and systems, and critical materials.

A $1 billion, 44% increase is sought for DOE's research programs in renewable energy and energy efficiency, to a level of $3.2 billion. In his State of the Union speech, Obama proposed to pay for the clean energy R&D increases by ending decades of federal subsidies to the fossil-fuel industries, primarily in the form of tax credits for the domestic production of oil, gas, and coal. The White House places the value of those subsidies at more than $3.6 billion. DOE also would cut its fossil-energy research program by 31.3%, or $207 million, to $453 million. The bulk of its fossil energy effort next year would be devoted to R&D aimed at improving the capture and storage of carbon and other emissions from coal combustion; DOE says that ARRA provided sufficient resources to fund the government's share of a cooperative program with industry to build several clean-coal technology demonstration plants. Spending for nuclear energy R&D would be held to near 2010 levels in FY 2012.

The Advanced Research Projects Agency–Energy (ARPA–E), DOE's fledgling grants program to support high-risk research that could lead to clean-energy breakthroughs, would receive $550 million through appropriated monies in 2012, compared with $389 million in 2010, essentially all of which was appropriated by ARRA. Despite overwhelming interest from both private- and public-sector performers of R&D (see related story, page 26), the newest DOE office has operated without 2011 funding. The White House proposes to provide ARPA–E with an additional $100 million in FY 2012, for a total of $650 million, from an off-budget, non-appropriated account that would be financed with revenues from auctioning portions of the electromagnetic spectrum to telecommunications providers. That proposal would require congressional approval.

The White House also seeks to increase by 17.5%, to about $3.5 billion, the nuclear weapons R&D programs at DOE's National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA). The president promised that increase last year to help secure him enough votes from Senate Republicans for ratification of the New START treaty with Russia. The NNSA proposal includes $418 million for nonproliferation and arms control verification R&D, an increase of more than one-third from 2010. The House's version of the FY 2011 long-term continuing resolution would cut $97 million from the $311 million that was appropriated for nonproliferation and verification R&D in 2010.

Department of Defense. While the Pentagon's mammoth $80.7 billion FY 2010 appropriation for R&D would be reduced by almost $5 billion overall next year, the tiny fraction of it that represents basic research would actually increase 14.5%, to a record $2.1 billion, under the White House plan. Although Congress has in past years supplemented administration requests for the basic and applied research portions of DOD's R&D portfolio—the budget accounts known as 6.1, 6.2, and 6.3—most of that addition has been in the form of earmarks for pet projects in lawmakers' districts or states. Next year will be different, however, since both sides of the aisle have agreed to an across-the-board moratorium on earmarking. The 6.1 basic research account, the smallest of the three, is of outsized importance to computer science and engineering; it contributes about one-third of all federal support for research in those disciplines. Pentagon basic research supplies an even greater share of the funding in some specific fields such as electrical and materials engineering. Taken together, funding for the 6.1 through 6.3 accounts would fall 8% in 2012, to $12.2 billion. The remaining $63.4 billion in the DOD request constitutes weapons systems development performed by industrial contractors. That figure represents a decline of 5.7% compared with 2010. The DOD request includes $3 billion for the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, essentially unchanged.

NASA. After the uproar Obama created last year by canceling President Bush's plan to send humans back to the Moon and possibly to Mars, the space agency is in for a much quieter year, with an overall budget request unchanged from its FY 2010 appropriation of $18.7 billion. Retirement of the space shuttles this year will free up almost $2.4 billion for use in other programs. Some of that will go to initiate Obama's $6 billion, five-year program for the commercial-sector design, development, and production of new spacecraft for human flight, for which $850 million is requested for 2012. A program to develop the technologies that will be needed for long-duration space travel would surge from $275 million to $1 billion in 2012. The space agency's basic science portfolio would grow by a more modest 11.5%, to $5 billion. But funding for the James Webb Space Telescope, a mission plagued by overruns and delays, would fall nearly 15%, to $374 million. The White House says its new funding profile and completion date will be developed in 2011, but that the telescope will be put on track without draining the astrophysics program. Support for aeronautics research would rise 14.6%, to $569 million, and funding for the now-complete International Space Station would rise 15.3%, to more than $2.8 billion.

NSF. The science foundation would see its budget rise 11.4%, to almost $7.8 billion, from the 2010 appropriation level, and would allow the award of 2000 more grants, a 27.8% increase from current numbers. The Obama budget calls for an additional $1 billion for NSF over five years from the president's proposed off-budget account funded from the spectrum auction. NSF would dedicate those revenues to research aimed at expanding the public's access to broadband wireless internet.

The 2012 budget continues a trend begun in recent years to direct more of NSF's individual investigator grants into such targeted research areas as clean energy, climate change, the environment, and advanced manufacturing. Multiple NSF directorates dedicate portions of their grant portfolios to those cross-agency thrusts. The $576 million requested for clean-energy research in 2012 is part of one thrust known as science, engineering, and education for sustainability, for which the White House is proposing $998 million for next year. That's up by one-third over the $661 million provided in 2010. NSF-sponsored research in advanced manufacturing, part of a multiagency White House initiative, would get $190 million next year, compared with $74 million in 2010. The foundation's computer and information science and engineering directorate and mathematical and physical sciences directorate are the principal contributors to that effort. A separate focus area known as science and engineering beyond Moore's law seeks to find a successor to today's dominant semiconductor technology, with the goal of keeping the increases in computer processing power on track after the physical limits of silicon-based technology are reached. Its funding level would increase by $12 million, to $96 million.

Research at the Interface of the Biological, Mathematical, and Physical Sciences ($76.1 million) is a proposed new collaboration among NSF directorates that aims to accelerate understanding of biological systems and apply that knowledge to fundamental understanding and development of new technologies, particularly in clean energy. A total of $225 million is requested next year for NSF's Major Research Equipment and Facilities Construction program, a 35.4% increase over the $166 million in 2010. Just five projects would be funded in 2012—Advanced LIGO, the Atacama Large Millimeter Array, the Advanced Technology Solar Telescope, the National Ecological Observatory Network, and the Ocean Observatories Initiative. A total of seven projects were funded in 2010.

With the 2012 budget, Obama proposes to terminate the NSF-led project known as the Deep Underground Science and Engineering Laboratory. Under construction in a disused gold and nonferrous metals mine in the Black Hills of South Dakota, DUSEL was to be jointly operated with DOE as an interdisciplinary laboratory with experimental facilities for physics, geophysics, and biology. But the National Science Board in December rejected the $19 million needed to keep the lab going through the fall. The board's programs and plans committee decided in December that operating DUSEL lies outside the agency's traditional scope of responsibilities (see PHYSICS TODAY,February 2011, page 21). NSF has already sunk $80 million into DUSEL, and South Dakota and its resident credit card magnate Denny Sanford have contributed $120 million to the project. The lab, however, would be kept above water—literally—in 2012 with $15 million from DOE's high-energy and nuclear physics research programs. That would keep the pumps that are needed to prevent flooding running until DOE decides how essential DUSEL is for the major particle- physics experiments it has planned to perform there.

Department of Homeland Security. A 1.9% increase of $28 million is proposed for homeland security R&D, to bring its total funding to more than $1.5 billion. Of the $170 million in new funding requested for DHS's Office of Science and Technology, $150 million is for construction startup of a new agricultural biodefense facility, a replacement for the outmoded Plum Island laboratory used to develop vaccines, antiviral drugs, and improved diagnostics to protect against emerging agricultural diseases. Funding for the Domestic Nuclear Detection Office would drop nearly 29% next year, from $469 million to $332 million.

NOAA and NIST. Both of the Department of Commerce's S&T agencies would see increases, though NIST's would be far larger in percentage terms, in keeping with Obama's pledge to continue the doubling of the basic research programs there over 10 years. The Technology Innovation Program, formerly the Advanced Technology Program, would get $75 million, a modest increase of $5 million for a program that, like DOE's ARPA–E, awards grants to help companies develop high-risk technologies that can't attract private financing but offer potentially big payoffs.

A total of $728 million is requested for the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration R&D, up 5.2% from 2010. A proposed reorganization of the agency would create a new Climate Service to house the 35% of the NOAA R&D that is devoted to climate research and monitoring. Combined, NOAA and NIST research on climate change are set to increase 15.4% next year, to $419 million.