NEWS: Bad News for Science and Technology in FY2008 Appropriations

December 22, 2007

Until this week, the only part of the Federal Government that had received appropriations for Fiscal Year 2008, which began October 1st, was the Department of Defense. According to analysis by the AAAS (American Association for the Advancement of Science), DoD will spend $77.8B on R&D, a decrease of 0.5% from FY 2007. Basic research (6.1) will increase by 3.2%, but applied research (6.2) and development (6.3) will decline by 6.3% and 8.4% respectively. DARPA funding will decline by 9.6% to $2.8B.

The bill funding the Departments of Labor, HHS, and Education had been vetoed by the President because the amounts exceeded his requests, and an attempt to override the veto failed by two votes in the House. Vetoes were also threatened on several of the ten other appropriations bills. Faced with this reality, Congressional leaders accepted the President’s limits and rolled the eleven remaining bills into an omnibus appropriations bill, which was passed on December 19 and is expected to be quickly signed by the President. Accurate apples-to-apples comparisons with prior funding are difficult to determine quickly, primarily because the bill contains $900 million in R&D earmarks. According to the AAAS, “basic and applied research” would grow at 0.4% at NSF, and 1% at both NIST and the DoE Office of Science. The new NIST TIP program will be funded, but at a much lower level than the last year of the ATP program it replaced. In any case, it is clear that R&D suffered substantially and plans to double research budgets at NSF, NIST and the DoE Office of Science, signed into law by the President in August, have generally been ignored.

Science and technology advocacy groups were not expecting such dramatic reductions over what Congress had included in earlier bills, and the response has been strong. Science Magazine called it a “heavy blow.” The Task Force on the Future of American Innovations, made up of high tech companies and industry associations, said “The nations that seek to challenge our global leadership in science and innovation should be greatly encouraged by this legislation.” ASTRA, another high-technology interest group, called the bill “Short-sighted and Short-changed.” The President of the Association of American Universities said “In exchange for an arbitrary cap on domestic spending and thousands of earmarks, the Administration and Congress have sacrificed investments in research and education that would help assure our nation's long-term national and economic security.”