In his State of the Union Address last night, President Obama rightly stated that investment in research and innovation has yielded huge dividends for the nation.
“Support the same kind of research and innovation that led to the computer chip and the Internet, to new American jobs and new American industries,” he urged Congress.
Read the entire APS statement commending the President’s emphasis on research and innovation.
The White House has announced that it will be releasing its budget for Fiscal Year 2013 on Feb. 13, rather than the first Monday in Feb., as is federal law. As to why the budget is delayed, a White House official stated that the delay was due to “the need to finalize decisions and technical details of the document.”
After partisan divides almost caused a government shutdown over the FY12 budget it is anyone’s guess as to what decisions need to be finalized. President Obama has already warned that Democrats will not like his budget plan, an indication that some of those decisions that need to be finalized are in regards to cuts in funding. With across-the-board sequestrations looming for FY13 appropriations next January and with conservatives pushing back against mandated defense cuts, non-defense programs covering most of science are already bracing for difficult times.
An issue related to open access was clarified today in a New York Times letter-to-the-editor by two American Physical Society executives who explained that the peer review process isn’t free.
Read the letter.
By Michael S. Lubell
Despite aggressive requests from the Obama Administration and the Department of Energy’s Office of Science, the House in the most recent appropriations debate made significant efforts to reduce funding for climate-related science. The Senate prevailed in the subsequent negotiations, and nearly all Office of Science programs received modest funding increases.
Congress recently passed the remaining nine appropriations bills to fund the government throughout Fiscal Year 2012 and the move was just in time as a continuing resolution funding the government expired at midnight on Dec. 16th.
While partisan politics was on full display throughout the process, key concessions from Republicans about policy riders and funding for the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau paved the way toward common ground in reaching a final agreement.
Despite the treacherous political landscape, federal funding for science did as well as the previously passed Commerce, Justice, and Science (CJS) appropriations bill. As with CJS, however, future funding levels are likely to decrease as the Budget Control Act mandates sequestrations to all federal accounts beginning in Fiscal Year (FY) 2013.
The nine appropriations bills passed include details on the funding for the Department of Energy (DOE) Office of Science, Advanced Research Projects Agency-Energy (ARPA-E), Energy Efficiency and Renewable Energy (EERE), the National Institutes of Health (NIH), and the Department of Defense (DOD) Basic and Applied Research.
The breakdown of funding follows:
ARPA-E experienced a significant increase of 53% in funding while most other accounts were modestly increased. NIH technically received an increase due to restructuring of funding for contributions to the Global AIDS Project. One caveat is that all awarded grants from NIH must now reflect the uncertainty of multi-year funding – a sure sign of the uncertainty of future budgets.
Overall, this is good news for the science community. The efforts of the science community weighing in on these budget issues has certainly helped maintain robust federal funding.
*The $30.69B includes a $297M transfer to the Global Aids project, thus the actual FY11 NIH budget was $30.39B.
Science funding may be a target for future budget cuts as a result of recent legislative actions. In the past, the scientific community has been able to rely on a few congressional champions to provide continued federal support for research and education, but the political and fiscal landscape has changed substantially. Budget constraints will require scientists to weigh in if they want to see sustained federal funding. The ability and efficacy of the scientific community’s speaking out about program cuts proposed earlier this year was clearly evident in November when Congress restored Fiscal Year 2012 funding for NSF, NIST, and NASA Science during final House-Senate negotiations on the appropriations bill covering Commerce, Justice and Science (CJS). But with the federal budget tightening in the coming years, the community will have to step up its efforts if it wants to achieve comparable positive results.
BUDGET SEQUESTRATIONS
Potential funding cuts will be triggered a year from now in the form of automatic across-the board reductions – technically called sequestrations – mandated by the 2011 amendments to the Budget Control Act (BCA) of 1985. According to the amended BCA, the recent failure of the Joint Select Committee on Deficit Reduction to come to an agreement on a debt reduction plan, will initiate $1.2 trillion in sequestrations over nine years, beginning with Fiscal Year 2013. The effect on science funding is not yet known, since the sequestrations will apply to appropriations bills that have yet to be written. However, once Congress has acted and the bills have been signed into law next year, sequestrations will automatically reduce defense appropriations by 11% and every account in non-defense appropriations by ~8%, effective January 2, 2013. For example, if appropriators choose to increase the National Science Foundation’s Research and Related Activities (R&RA) account by 2% in the Fiscal Year 2013 CJS bill, their action would result in a 6% decrease in the R&RA account at the start of calendar year 2013.
BUDGET CAPS
In addition to triggering sequestrations, the BCA amendments mandate caps for overall discretionary spending over a ten-year period beginning with Fiscal Year 2012. Appropriators must adhere to those caps in the aggregate, but they may alter individual accounts to reflect their priorities. As a result, Congress has the ability to increase science funding relative to other accounts but it will do so only if lawmakers believe the rationale is compelling.
LOOKING AHEAD
During the next year you will have ample opportunity to contact your representatives in Congress and impress upon them why science funding is important. Doing so through visits, phone calls, and letters will let them know their constituents care about these issues. If enough voices combine together, Congress will hear the message.
The House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform recently approved legislation that its sponsors say is aimed at creating greater transparency in the awarding of federal grants. Among other provisions, the Grant Reform and New Transparency Act of 2011 (H.R. 3433), called the “GRANT Act,” would:
The most troublesome section of the bill would require OMB to publicly post the name, title, and employer of all individuals who served as reviewers of the grant program for the six months preceding the award. The same information would be required of peer reviewers of the awarded grant.
The bill’s sponsors, who include the House Oversight Committee Chairman, Congressman Darryl Issa, and Congressman James Lankford, introduced the bill to create transparency in the federal grant process. Unfortunately, the legislators are unaware of the damage it would cause to scientific research.
The bill appears to be on a fast track through the House. It was introduced on November 16th by Congressman Lankford and was marked up and voted out of the Oversight Committee the very next day. Moreover, it is possible that the bill will be considered and passed on the floor before the House adjourns for the holidays, given the support of Congressman Issa.
While this does not necessarily mean the bill would make it through the Senate – a companion bill has not been introduced, and the Senate’s plate is full through the end of the session – passage of this bill in the House would set a dangerous precedent by permitting the politicization of the objective scientific peer review process and undermining the credibility of science more generally.
The APS Office of Public Affairs is actively engaged on this matter and will keep APS members apprised of developments related to this bill.
As physicists, many of us recognize the need for outreach activities and enjoy interacting with the public about science. Unfortunately, there is a stigma that such activities undermine our academic work. We often fear that our colleagues will look down upon us for engaging the public, and therefore, we regard such activities as an impediment to academic success.
As popular science blogger PZ Myers puts it, “People who do outreach are regarded as second-class citizens in the science world” [1]. However, this statement lies in stark contrast to a recent research study of European scientists. It states: “Scientists who are active in dissemination [outreach activities] are also more active academically” [2].
The study, by Jensen et al., presents key findings regarding the benefits of scientific outreach on scientists’ careers.
Among the findings:
While there is certainly room for interpretation of these results, this study should be cited to dispel the many myths surrounding spending time on outreach and advocacy. In fact, the next step suggested by the study is to “invent new ways of evaluating and rewarding the active scientists.” Truly, reward and recognition for the civil duty of scientists is long overdue.
Despite dire economic news and predictions for decreased federal budgets, we were pleased to learn that cuts to NIST and NSF in the House and Senate versions of the Fiscal Year 2012 appropriations bills were reversed in conference. We appreciate the efforts of our membership in helping to reinforce the importance of federal science funding with Members of Congress.
However, given the impending failure of the supercommittee to agree on cuts, and the potential for sequestration that will trigger across-the-board cuts to the federal budget in Fiscal Year 2013, the bump up both agencies received may be the last we see for quite a while.
On Friday, Nov. 18th, the President signed the first FY 2012 “minibus” spending bill, which combined the Commerce, Justice, Science and Related Agencies bill with appropriations for Agriculture, Housing and Urban Development (HUD) and Transportation. The bill, H.R. 2112, provides funding for the National Science Foundation (NSF), the National Institutes of Standards and Technology (NIST), the National Aeronautic and Space Administration (NASA) and the Office of Science and Technology (OSTP).
It also includes another short-term continuing resolution (CR) to keep the government running until December 16th, allowing Congress additional time to complete the remaining FY 2012 spending bills. The funding breakdown is as follows:
Additional breakdowns can be found in the conference report. Science funding appears in Title III of the legislation. The bill included an unexpected increase for NSF, beyond both the House- and Senate-passed levels. The James Webb Telescope at NASA, which was cut by the House and funded by the Senate, was included in the final bill. OSTP received a significant cut, stemming from a dispute between OSTP Director John Holdren and Rep. Frank Wolf (R-VA), Chairman of the House Appropriations Commerce-Justice-Science Subcommittee, over collaboration with China. However, the cut was not as deep as what Wolf leveled at OSTP in the House version of the CJS bill.
The Senate tried to move another minibus this week, which would have included the Energy and Water Development, State-Foreign Operations, and Financial Services bills, though a series of problematic amendments derailed that effort.
It now looks like FY 2012 will be completed by wrapping the nine remaining appropriations bills together in a “midibus,” using the DoD appropriations bill as the vehicle.
As the congressional supercommittee strives to reach its goal of slashing at least $1.2 trillion from the federal deficit, it should maintain robust federal support of scientific research, which has given our nation amazing technologies.
The laser, MRI, iPad and the Internet are just a few examples of the many innovations that began years ago inside a science laboratory.
Former U.S. Congressman Vernon Ehlers (Grand Rapids, Mich.) and Cornell University graduate student John Mergo recently wrote op-eds making the aforementioned case in pieces published in the Grand Rapids Press and the Chillicothe Gazette.
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