Can We Afford Science Research?

On December 14, 1972, the voice of astronaut Gene Cernan, the last man to walk on the moon, came through the loudspeaker at NASA Houston: “I take man’s last step from the surface, back home for some time to come…God-willing we will return.”  The Apollo missions, of which Apollo 17 was the last, were by far the most popular manned missions ever run by NASA.  The American romanticization of space exploration—think The Right Stuff or Apollo 13—started with those seventeen missions between 1963 and 1972.
When the Apollo missions ended in 1972, NASA did not know when it would again be prepared to launch manned missions. It took almost a decade for the next phase of human space flight to commence—the space shuttle Columbia launched in 1981.  Those nine years of, from the outside, apparent stagnation of the space program were the direct result of budgetary constraints at NASA.   Now, with the last shuttle mission over as of July, there is an opportunity to evaluate how the United States—the world’s leader in innovation for the last century—chooses to spend its money when it comes to research.
NASA is a purely exploratory agency—some would say that astrophysics is research at its purest, that astronauts are the abstract counterparts of Magellen and Marco Polo.  Exploration doesn’t save lives or help the economy in the way energy or health research does.  As a result, NASA has always been budget constrained compared to other research agencies, especially since the end of the Cold War somewhat eased fears of space-based weapons systems.
Necessary Efficiency
Decades of budget constraints have taught NASA to work efficiently with the money it is given.  Unlike the National Institutes of Health which often funds hundreds of research groups working on the same health problem, NASA can only afford to focus on a small number of missions at a time.  Research and design for the shuttle missions could not begin until the money from the Apollo program was freed up.
With the shuttle program ending in 2011, NASA is now able to begin focusing in earnest on missions outside low-earth orbit, including a manned mission to Mars.  It seems simple—prioritize and focus in order to conduct cost-effective research.  But NASA’s model is revolutionary among research agencies in the federal government, and in a time of budget crunches there is something to be learned from NASA’s success.
Money is a perennial concern in the research community, whether it is stem cell funding or money for developing new energy sources.  The federal government funds research in every conceivable scientific field.  Ten different agencies receive funding annually, and the majority have seen their budgets decrease since the financial crisis in 2008.  Table 1 outlines how research money is allocated in the 2010 budget.
TABLE 1
Research funding by agency (in millions of dollars)

The Budget for Fiscal Year 2012, Historical Tables
There are two ways Congress justifies changing research spending: Congress can either increase or decrease funding directly aimed at a specific program such as the shuttle program, cancer research, or ethanol fuel, or it can allocate money based on the perceived overall effectiveness or agenda of the agency sponsoring the research.  The National Science Foundation, for example, falls into the second category.  The NSF is rarely allocates money for specific progams because the NSF funds hundreds of endeavors in an array of fields, filling in the gaps between the grants issued by more specialized agencies.  Therefore, funding considerations for the NSF have historically been tied to the perceived effectiveness of the agency.  As a result, regardless of the grants issued by the NSF, funding of the agency has tended to remain stable across administrations and congresses.
Budget Politics
The stability of the NSF budget is an anomaly, however.  In general, funding for research is subject to the same political tides as other slivers of the federal budget.  Often, presidents have trouble compelling Congress to pass a budget that reflects the administration’s agenda.  This is not new – at the end of the day, spending levels are the main reflection of policy and the president often has his work cut out for him, especially with an opposition-controlled congress.  With an oppressive deficit of $14.32 trillion, almost equal to the annual GDP, lawmakers on both sides of the aisle were pushing for cuts in this year’s budget.  The struggle was to put together a budget that cut wasteful spending, a hard task since identifying wasteful spending can be so politically charged.
President Obama has made it clear since he entered the White House that protecting funding for scientific research is one of his priorities.  In 2009, he challenged America to go back to the moon.  He has called for carbon-free energy sources and cleaner transportation alternatives.  The president is a firm believer in the promise of research and technology to create economic growth and jobs, issues which are foremost in the minds of Americans as the recession continues.
President Obama has also acknowledged the national debt as among the most serious domestic problems facing the country and has called for more responsible spending.  The same president who after the financial crisis in 2008 warned Americans not to spend outside their means, and promised the federal government would do the same, has been faced this year with the realities of trimming spending.  Research should not be exempt from this—research agencies are, after all, federal agencies, and they have their share of bureaucratic inefficiencies.
However, little has been done to cut down on inefficiencies in the research sector.  Unlike years past, the divide between Republicans and Democrats seems to be closing when it comes to opinions on basic research, says Patrick Clemins of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS).  Most lawmakers agree that basic research is imperative and that the government should, to some extent, fund it.
Instead, the main source of controversy in the debates over the 2012 budget is to what extent the private sector versus the government should fuel innovation.  Republicans say that, with money tight, now is the time to let private companies drive innovation in biotechnology, energy, and agriculture.  Democrats point out that the private sector, including private research institutions that fund innovation, are also hurting in this economy so it is more important than ever to maintain government funding sources.
And with very few exceptions, research agencies will be funded at or above 2010 levels in the coming year.  The question is what exactly that will mean for innovation in America.  Is this money well spent, or will it be lost to bureaucratic inefficiency?  In other words, how much of the money will actually make it to researchers, and for what kinds of projects?  Here’s a look at how the Federal Budget will fund research in major areas in the next fiscal year, with a focus on how inefficiency has or has not been addressed.
Energy
Energy is the most devisive of research areas:  it is here that President Obama is most ambitious and most at odds with the Tea Party wing of the Republican Party.  Many Republicans who believe they were elected on a fiscal responsibility mandate also believe research should primarily focus on making the fossil fuels we use perform better – more efficiently and more cleanly.  Lawmakers from states that rely on fossil fuel industry such as West Virginia and the gulf tend tend to agree with this view.  Technologies such as scrubbers for removing particulates from coal smoke and new drilling and mining techniques to lessen environmental impact of accessing fossil fuel deposits are the focus of Republican DOE funding, according to the chairman of the Energy and Power subcommittee, Ed Whitfield (R-KY).
The president disagrees, and in the 2011 budget it is the president who has won.  The new budget projects an estimated $2 billion for research into new ways to store, use, and produce energy as well as an additional $146 million for three new Energy Innovation Hubs for materials scientists and engineers to conduct research on new grid and battery technologies.  The new initiatives in the DOE budget address energy inefficiency, which costs billions of dollars each year in electricity bills.  Right now, up to twelve percent of energy transmitted via power lines is lost to “leaky” lines.  Designing a new grid system, which will be the focus of the Energy Innovation Hubs, is an innovation-based approach to economic stimulus.  Like reducing gas prices, increasing the efficiency of electricity storage and transmission puts money directly into the pockets of American citizens and businesses, reducing the cost of living and doing business.
All told, including money for modernizing the electrical grid, the new budget includes almost $5 billion in new money for clean energy.  Where does the money come from?  The administration, much to the chagrin of lawmakers tied to fossil fuels, has eliminated $4 billion in subsidies to oil, gas, and other fossil fuel producers.  The CEO of the American Petroleum Institute, Jack Gerard, said that, from an economic stimulus standpoint, eliminating subsidies will bring up the price of fossil fuels and make the cost of living and doing business higher.  Said Gerard, the end of subsidies for oil and natural gas “comes at one of the worst times in our economic history…this industry is among the nation’s largest job creators.”
Health
Most everyone agrees that finding ways to cure human disease is important.  The National Institutes of Health (NIH) is the research arm of the Department of Health and Human Services and has rarely in the last decade seen its budget seriously challenged.  And with good reason: the NIH funds hundreds of thousands of health-related basic science projects in laboratories and hospitals across the country.  NIH money has paid for innovations such as chemotherapy to treat cancer and antiretrovirals for AIDS.  A large part of the credit for the superiority of the United States when it comes to health research and biomedical innovation goes to the NIH.
So it comes as no surprise that the National Institutes of Health can expect to see an expected $32 billion this fiscal year, maintaining its budget from last year.  Congress has asked the NIH to particularly focus on cancer, Alzheimer’s, and autism-spectrum disorders – three high-priority areas that the NIH Director Francis Collins listed in his testimony before the subcommittee on Health and Human Services in February.
One weak spot at the NIH is the efficiency of its grant process. Ten percent of the agency’s budget falls to the administration of the 50,000 competitive grants issued each year to scientists at private insitutions. The employment of grant writers at private institutions is a needless drain on the biomedical research community.  If the grant process were streamlined to better match the tenure and journal submission processes, scientists could spend more time at the bench.
Basic Innovation
This budget marks the beginning of a ten-year initiative to secure America’s place at the forefront of innovation.  It is a bipartisan initiative to double money for the National Science Foundation, National Institutes of Standards and Technology, and other key basic research agencies over the next ten years.  As a result, the NSF can expect to see an estimated thirteen percent increase in funding this year.  The funds are marked for use building new research facilities around the country such as the $103 million Ocean Observatories Inititiative to provide ocean data via a network of sensors and the $88 million National Ecological Observatory Network, a facility that would collect data on climate, land-use, and invasive species.
Not all NSF funding will go toward basic research.  The increase will also extend to science teacher training.  President Obama has made clear that “…to succeed, you’re going to have to be able to possess the skills and knowledge of a twenty first century economy.  That means math, and that means science.”  The NSF budget is where the America COMPETES Act really materializes, with money for both basic research and for science education.  Because the NSF will be working directly to build new research institutions, little will be lost to overhead or wastefulness.  The NSF, like NASA, has learned from experience how to be efficient.
NASA, the agency-king of operating on a limited budget, is unsurprisingly the one major research agency that will be seeing cuts this year. NASA’s budget is projected to fall as much as fifty percent in the next three years.  As NASA prepares for a period of belt tightening, they have already shifted focus to sending men to Mars and replacing the 20-year-old Hubble Space Telescope.  Other research agencies can look to the space agency’s prioritization and disciplined command structure for guidance on how to better use the money they have been entrusted with to make life here on earth more sustainable, healthy, and safe.
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