Government

R&D funding faces cuts in tight budget year Already knifed, for instance,

have been funding requests

by DOE for basic energy

research, including chemical

and materials sciences

Moneywise things looked quite good for the research community last January. The Administration was predicting a 9% inflation rate in fiscal 1981 and submitting a budget pro­posal to Congress that called for a 13% increase in federal R&D spending.

Then the inflation rate started rising much faster than anticipated, and the Administration and Congress decided that the federal budget had to be balanced. So, as Presidential science adviser Frank Press said re­cently at the American Association for the Advancement of Science Col­loquium on R&D, "in mid-March we went back to the drawing board, so to speak, to see what revisions could be made in R&D programs to help sup­port the President's initiatives. Needless to say, the revision process was a traumatic experience."

But the results haven't been too bad. Reductions in proposed R&D funding for 1981 have been only on the order of 2 to 3%, as compared to about 8% for other controllable ele­ments of the budget, Press points out, when the Administration submitted its revised budget to Congress in April.

Early indications are, however, that Congress may not be so kind to R&D as the Administration has been. The House Appropriations Committee, which, along with its Senate coun­terpart, decides how much money a federal agency will be able to spend in any fiscal year, has begun reporting out the fiscal 1981 appropriation bills. The numbers in the first of the bills to reach the House floor do not bring good news to the research commu­nity.

For example, the committee cut the Department of Energy's funding re­quest for basic energy research 44% to $199.2 million. The request for chemical sciences was cut 10% to $55.7 million and that for materials

Press: a traumatic experience

sciences 13% to $79 million. The committee, in its report on the DOE appropriations bill, explained that it decided to hold funding for DOE's basic research programs essentially at fiscal 1980 levels because of "current national budgetary constraints, the long-term nature of the programs, and the committee's concern as to the absence of significant outputs."

Phrases such as "the imperative need for fiscal constraint" appear repeatedly in the* report and the committee apparently took them quite seriously. DOE's budget for its energy supply, research and devel­opment activities (excluding fossil energy, which is handled in a different appropriations bill) was set at $2.2 billion by the committee. That level is 4% less than the Administration requested and 2% less than fiscal 1980 funding levels.

Among the requests that were cut the most were those for interim spent fuel storage, down 41% to $11.5 mil­lion, and commercial nuclear waste management, down 20% to $175.5 million. These cuts were made not because the committee felt that the programs were not important, but because it believes that there should be a major redirection of effort in the programs to resolve nuclear waste management questions earlier and more economically than the Admin­istration has proposed.

Also cut by the committee were requests for solar energy, down 10% to $513.2 million, and geothermal, down 20% to $6.8 million. DOE's budget request for general science and re­search, which is in a separate budget category and which includes life sci­ences research, high-energy physics, and nuclear physics, also was cut about 8% to $348 million.

However, the severe budget con­straints didn't seem to be quite so tight when it came to deciding how much should be spent on DOE's atomic energy defense activities. For this the committee cut the budget request less than 1% to $2.7 billion, a figure that is 15% higher than the fiscal 1980 level.

The Department of Commerce's scientific and technical research and services operations, which include the National Bureau of Standards, the National Technical Information Service, and the Office of Environ­mental Affairs, also are slated for an increase of 15% in fiscal 1981 to $113.1 million under the committee bill. But that amount is almost $6 million less than the budget request.

According to the committee, the $113 million will provide for increases in a number of programs. These in­creases include $3.3 million for de­velopment of measurement technol­ogy for commercialization of very large integrated circuits, $2.5 million for maintenance of a technical com­petence at NBS, and $1.5 million for implementation of a technology transfer program at NTIS. In addi­tion, $5.2 million is included for es­tablishment of three cooperative generic technology centers, just as Commerce requested in January.

The committee's fiscal conserva­tism extended even to Congress' own agencies. The Office of Technology Assessment had requested a 30% budget increase; instead the com­mittee decided to continue funding for the office at its 1980 level of $11 million. The Congressional Budget Office requested an increase of 12%, and instead got an increase of 2% to $12.4 million. The General Account­ing Office fared somewhat better. It requested a 9% increase and got a 5% increase to $210 million. All of these agencies were told they could not hire any additional staff members. D

June 30, 1980 C&EN 15