The Senate Appropriations Committee will examine federal investments in research and development, in light of the president’s budget request that did not boost scientific spending to match the rate of inflation–or, in the case of the Defense Department, declined.
SAC Defense Subcommittee Chairman Dick Durbin (D-Ill.) said Tuesday morning at the Center for National Policy that “a research budget that fails to keep up with inflation fails to foster scientific progress, hurts our economy, jeopardizes our health and undermines our world leadership.”
Durbin, who also serves as the assistant majority leader in the Senate, called the president’s budget request “good but not good enough” in its support for research and development accounts across government departments and agencies. Federal funding for scientific research ought to see real growth–5 percent or more, he said–to attract the best researchers and produce the best results. In contrast, Durbin said the National Institutes of Health saw a 0.9 percent increase in funding in the fiscal year 2015 budget request and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention saw a 0.7 percent increase, less than the 1.6 percent rate of inflation for the most recent year, according to government.
DoD actually saw a decrease in R&D funding in the FY ’15 request, $11.5 billion compared to the $12 billion in the enacted FY ’14 budget. The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency saw a minor increase in its budget, with the president requesting $2.9 billion compared to $2.8 billion in FY ’14. But the request for basic research in DoD dropped from $2.2 billion in FY ’14 to $2.0 billion in the FY ’15 request, applied research dropped from $4.6 billion to $4.5 billion, and advanced technology development dropped from $5.2 billion to $5.0 billion, according to the Pentagon’s budget overview documents.
To address the lack of federal support for research and development, Durbin announced a new initiative on Tuesday, the American Cures Act, which would create a 10-year mandatory fund for biomedical research in the country’s top four research agencies: NIH, CDC, DoD and Veterans Affairs. The program would start funding at $1.8 billion in the first year and gradually increase, providing $150 billion total over the 10 years. Durbin said he would introduce the bill in the Senate soon.
In the meantime, as his defense appropriations subcommittee gets started on its work on the FY ’15 spending bill, Durbin said “I’ll do my best in the appropriations committee to increase the part of it that I can touch.”
More broadly, Senate Appropriations Committee Chairwoman Barbara Mikulski (D-Md.) will host a hearing to look at investment in research and development efforts government-wide, Durbin said.
“She said, I’m going to help you put this in perspective,” he said of his conversation with her when they first discussed the American Cures Act. “So I think the conversation’s underway.”
A spokesman for Mikulski, Vincent Morris, said Tuesday afternoon that the chairwoman’s priorities for the FY ’15 budget would be investments in innovation and infrastructure, to include health and other research. “She worked to restore those funds in the negotiations over the [FY ’14 spending package] and wants to prioritize it in the 2015 cycle,” he said.