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Clinton’s
‘Historic’ R&D Budget for Fiscal 2001 It’s a humdinger! President Clinton’s eighth and last budget is his best yet for science, engineering, and education supported by federal R&D agencies. Even so, these priorities occupy a small portion of the total $1.84 trillion budget proposed for fiscal 2001, a 2.5% increase on the $1.79 trillion to be spent by the federal government this year. The new budget, according to Office of Management and Budget mathematics, would begin to wipe out in the next 13 years a national debt that had been accumulating, more or less, since 1835, when Andrew Jackson was president. When Clinton’s budget request for fiscal 2001 was released on 7 February, Neal Lane, director of the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy, characterized it as “historic” and quickly added, “I can hardly wait to get up to the Hill to present it.” Even though the president had previewed his new R&D proposals in a major speech at Caltech on 21 January and his State of the Union message a week later (see Physics Today, March, page 59), his administration’s budget would increase total federal science and technology funding by $2.6 billion, or 3.1%, to $85.3 billion, and would raise federal funding of university research by $1.3 billion, or about 8%, to $17.8 billion. The prospective increases would be spread across virtually all the R&D agencies, except the Department of Defense (DOD).
The centerpiece of the proposed budget is the National Science Foundation (NSF), the only agency committed to supporting R&D across the expanse of science and engineering disciplines. NSF would receive $3.5 billion for its research account, a leap of $561 million, or 19.3%. The agency’s overall increase, which includes the research and education portfolios as major facilities, would add up to an all-time high of around $4.6 billion, a boost of $675 million, or 17%—doubling the largest dollar increase ever attained. No wonder Rita Colwell, who heads NSF, told reporters on Budget Day, “This is very exciting. . . . We couldn’t ask for a better way to mark NSF’s 50th anniversary.” Best of all, more than $300 million of the proposed boost would not be “tied to any specific initiative,” said Colwell. “This gives us the flexibility we’ve been seeking for years.” The president’s budget also calls for the Department of Energy (DOE) to go up nearly 9% higher than its current appropriation, to a total of $18.9 billion. DOE’s science office, which is the government’s largest supporter of the physical sciences and sponsor of major scientific facilities used by a variety of disciplines, would be raised by $337 million, or 12% above the current fiscal year, to $3.2 billion. Energy Secretary Bill Richardson boasted that Clinton’s request is “the largest increase in our science business line since 1992 and reflects our commitment to keep America at the cutting edge.” NASA would get an increase for the first time during the Clinton presidency. The fiscal 2001 request is up 3% to $13.7 billion, and, what’s more, the administration’s out-year projections would have NASA’s budget climbing to $15.5 billion by fiscal 2005. Asked what he thought of the proposed increase for next year, NASA Administrator Dan Goldin beamed, “For my answer, just look at the smile on my face.” Space science would get nearly half of the proposed $435 million increase, giving it a budget of $2.4 billion. Goldin said he sees NASA “returning to its roots—cutting edge, fundamental R&D.” The Department of Commerce’s two R&D agencies fare wonderfully well for a change. The National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) would get an increase of $77 million to $713 million, a 12% jump, with the research laboratories slated for a $55.1 million bump, to $332.3 million. The Advanced Technology Program, which has been treated shabbily by the Republican-dominated Congress in recent years, is set for a $32.9 million rise, to $175.5 million. The National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration would receive a large $489 million jump in its budget, to a total of $2.9 billion, or 20% more than this year. According to the agency’s administrator, James Baker, “Most of our programs are things Congress likes,” though he admits that the agency generally has done better in getting funds for operational rather than research activities. The 2001 budget requests a 5.6% rise for the National Institutes of Health (NIH), always a favorite in Congress, and the increase amounts to a whopping $1 billion, for a total of $18.8 billion. The proposed addition is less than half of the $2.2 billion increase NIH received in fiscal 2000. Still, funds for most of its institutes and centers would get increases of between 5% and 6%. With one of the agency’s top priorities being HIV/ AIDS research, NIH’s Office of AIDS Research would receive $2.1 billion, up nearly 8% over the current year. By contrast, DOD’s R&D budget, which traditionally is the major source of funding for mathematics and computer research, would fall slightly by 0.2% to $38.6 billion, mostly because of sharp cuts in applied research and exploratory development across all three services as well as organizations such as the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA). Although the Clinton budget would provide a substantial $11 billion, or 4%, increase in the total DOD budget of $292 billion in 2001, the additional funds would mostly go to weapons procurement and day-to-day operations. Among the department’s range of R&D categories, the “6.1” (basic research) account would receive an increase of $55 million, or 4.8%, to $1.2 billion, after an even larger rise in fiscal 2000. DARPA would go up 4% to $2 billion—the increase devoted mainly to its fundamental information technology and biological warfare research programs. The Ballistic Missile Defense Organization is marked up for a 15% boost in its R&D account, to $3.9 billion, including $1.7 billion, up from $1 billion this year, for the troubled National Missile Defense program. On 1 February, congressional leaders of both parties emerged from a White House meeting and said they and Clinton were working from the same set of priorities. Everyone claimed there wasn’t the temperament or the time, in an election year, for a lengthy and contentious budget battle. But with the release of Clinton’s proposed budget a week later, both sides returned to their prickly partisan positions. Thus ended the budget comity, and the comedy so often played out on the floors of Congress began in earnest. Even before Clinton’s budget reached Capitol Hill, Republican budget hawks pecked at it. “The president has presented the American people with a budgetary fantasy,” sneered House Budget Committee Chairman John R. Kasich of Ohio. “Much of it is a rehash of previous proposals that have already been rejected. As far as I’m concerned, it’s dead on arrival.” The House Appropriations Committee Chairman, Bill Young of Florida, had a slightly different take. “Reading through the details of the president’s budget, I became alarmed by the number of new government initiatives, huge programmatic increases, and fancy bureaucratic rhetoric. In my wildest dreams, I cannot see his proposals become reality. We simply will not have the funds. The president didn’t just blow the spending lids. He blew all commitment to fiscal restraint and sanity.” House Science Committee Chairman F. James Sensenbrenner Jr, a Wisconsin Republican, warned against “budgetary game-playing,” recalling that Clinton proposed a funding increase for NSF two years ago that was linked to his unsuccessful attempt to increase tobacco taxes. Nonetheless, Clinton believes his budget will prevail in Congress, mostly because of his success in previous budget battles. The projected surpluses in the Social Security trust fund are now treated as largely untouchable by Democrats and Republicans alike. Clinton and his congressional opponents are walking different paths this election year, though they both have the same goal—to win the White House and Congress in November. For this reason, Clinton stressed his conservative assumptions for the future fiscal surplus in his budget arithmetic, which is smaller than the Republican estimate or even the projection of the Congressional Budget Office, whose figure relies on maintaining the spending caps that both sides accepted in the 1997 Balanced Budget Act. The spending caps for discretionary programs were ignored last year, and Clinton’s budget would doff the caps this year, so that the new budget would include spending increases for health care and education—core issues of this year’s elections—as well as for R&D. Clinton also has proposed small tax cuts for the less-well-off and a higher military budget, to steal the Republicans’ clothes. The House and Senate budget committees have initiated resolutions setting revenue targets and spending ceilings for broad categories of discretionary programs. The resolutions are carried out in the fall by passing specific appropriations and tax bills. The House measure allots about $597 billion for discretionary programs other than such entitlements as Social Security and Medicare and Medicaid. This figure is significantly less than the $625 billion required to pay for Clinton’s request for fiscal 2001. The difference in the numbers sets the stage for the annual confrontation between the White House and Congress. Still, both political parties seem to agree on the need for a more balanced R&D portfolio, so that NSF’s or DOE’s basic science programs won’t be shortchanged to fatten defense applicaitons or to pad accounts at NIH or NASA. Both Democrats and Republicans applaud Clinton’s greater support of the $514 million information technology research program, though they may disagree on the details. Similarly, there is bipartisan intoxication with the administration’s $495 million nanotechnology initiative, which aims to develop computers the size of sugar cubes by manipulating matter at the atomic and molecular levels. Below are some budget highlights:
Irwin Goodwin © 2000 American Institute of Physics [an error occurred while processing this directive] |
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