Federal R&D efforts could get boost

The Obama administration wants to pump significant increases of funding into some federal research and development science and technology saying it's trying to make up for years of neglect by the previous administration.

While non-discretionary Defense Department and homeland security funding will be flat for three years, many federal agencies which conduct R&D would not be among those affected by the freeze.

In the fiscal 2011 budget issued Monday, President Obama calls for $147.7 billion in federal R&D efforts, up by only $343 million over 2010. But non-DoD research and development funding could see a $3.7 billion increase (5.9 percent) and some programs could see double digit growth.

"In making the decisions embodied in the 2011 budget, [the President] managed to preserve and expand what most needed to be preserved and expanded in the government's investments in research and development, and in science, technology, engineering and math in education," says John Holdren, the assistant to the President for science and technology and the director of the Office of Science and Technology Policy during a briefing with reporters Monday in Washington. "Embedded in a relatively flat overall R&D budget are some very healthy increases that are most important to this nation's future. This is an approach we can expect to see more of."

Three such priorities are the R&D budgets of the National Science Foundation, the Energy Department's Office of Science and the National Institute of Standards and Technology.

Holdren says the budget request for all three agencies continue down the path to meet the President's goal of doubling their funding by 2017.

The three agencies would see a 6.6 percent increase for an uptick of $13.3 billion overall.

NASA also came out of the 2011 process poised to be a winner among R&D agencies.

Holdren says NASA's space exploration program would receive $6 billion over the next five years to expand the agency's work in space.

"In order to make human exploration of space beyond low earth orbit more affordable and more practical, we are launching a vigorous new technology development and test program that will begin to reverse decades of under investments in new ideas," he says. "We are putting the science back into the rocket science at NASA."

Aneesh Chopra, the federal chief technology officer, summed up the federal technology R&D efforts in three main investment areas:

• Promoting innovation by doing several things, including making private R&D investment easier by making the tax credit permanent, focusing on commercialization of technologies and expanding access to broadband.

• Spurring entrepreneurship and promoting efficiency through the cultivation of regional innovation clusters and giving small businesses better access to capital.

• Supporting technology breakthroughs by promoting standards through NIST or promoting education improvements around science, technology, math and engineering.

Chopra says all of the federal R&D efforts will be tracked through a dashboard.

"We've stood up with the National Science and Technology Council…a working group to stand up this dashboard so that we have a better linkage between outcomes and investments, and can separate those that are higher performing from lower performing," he says. "How and in what manner those are measured will be all part of the design that we are committed to having up and running this year."

Other agencies that could receive large increases in R&D funding:

• Energy Advanced Research Projects Agency--$300 million
• Agriculture Department's Food and Research Initiative--$429 million (63 percent)
• Education R&D--$383 million (10.1 percent)
• Smithsonian Institution R&D--$236 million (13.5 percent)

For complete coverage of the FY 2011 budget on FederalNewsRadio.com, see Keyword: Budget

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