Obama Boosts Federal R&D By $2 Billion

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The White House has proposed a $2 billion increase in the budget for federal research and development (R&D) for fiscal year 2013, with the a particular boost to research being done at the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST), and the Department of Energy (DOE).

President Obama's proposed R&D budget for 2013, released Monday, also provides $3 billion to science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) education as part of an ongoing effort to prepare a more technology-savvy workforce and help the United States remain competitive overseas.

In total, the White House has proposed $140.8 billion for R&D, an increase of 1.4% over last year's enacted budget, according to the Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP), which partners with the Office of Management and Budget (OMB) to advise the president on R&D priorities.

The proposed federal research portfolio, which encompasses basic and applied research, is $64.0 billion, an increase of $2 billion, or 3.3%, over what was spent last year, and the proposal for non-defense R&D is $64.9 billion, a 5% boost.

[Big data, mobility, cybersecurity, and the cloud are top priorities for NIST going forward. Read more at Federal Standards Body Focuses On Big Data, Cloud.]

The increase has been offset by reductions in Department of Defense (DOD) weapons-system development that is transitioning to production, according to the OSTP. Overall, the DOD took a 2.1% budget cut to $71.2 billion.

The budget proposal includes stipends for research efforts in clean air and energy at the Department of Energy. Specifically, it provides $350 million for transformational energy R&D in the DOE's Advanced Research Projects Agency-Energy, and $2.3 billion for DOE's Energy Efficiency and Renewable Energy office to focus on clean-vehicle technologies research.

The proposal also calls for $2.6 billion for the U.S. Global Change Research Program (USGCRP), which aims to understand and prevent global changes resulting from over-dependence on fossil fuels.

Also benefiting from the budget increase are the National Science Foundation (NSF) and the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) laboratories, which--along with the DOE's science office--will get a combined $13.1 billion, an increase of 4.4% over their funding last year.

The DHS and NIST also will get significant bumps for their R&D efforts, with the DHS seeing a 26.3% increase of $729 million; and NIST seeing a proposed labs budget for 2013 of $708 million, an increase of 13.8% over last year's funding, according to the OSTP.

Other agencies and research efforts that have proposed increases for 2013 include:

--NASA ($9.6 billion, up 2.2%)

--The National Nanotechnology Initiative ($1.8 billion, up 4.1%)

--U.S. Geological Survey ($718 million, up 6.4%)

--The Environmental Protection Agency R&D ($580 million, up 2.1%).

Despite the overall increase, it wasn't all good news for agency R&D budgets, as some likely will see their funding fall next year. Those include the U.S. Department of Agriculture, which takes a 1.5% cut to $2.3 billion in the proposal; and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, which takes a 3.8% cut to $552 million.

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