On March 4, President Obama released preliminary details of his fiscal year (FY) 2015 budget request to Congress.  The proposal totals $3.901 trillion, including $1.014 trillion in discretionary spending, which keeps the caps set in the budget agreement brokered by Congress at the end of 2013.  Total federal R&D funding would reach $135.4 billion in FY 2015, $1.7 billion more than FY 2014, and would include $65.9 billion for non-defense R&D, an increase of $477 million.

The budget also includes a proposal for an additional $56 billion in discretionary spending, split between defense and non-defense discretionary programs, to be paid for with spending cuts and revenue created by closing tax breaks, according to the White House.  If funded, this new "Opportunity, Growth and Security Initiative" would provide $5.3 billion in additional R&D funding to agencies such as the National Institutes of Health, National Science Foundation, Department of Defense, U.S. Department of Agriculture, Department of Energy, National Institute of Standards and Technology, and other agencies.  This funding is intended to supplement the President's requested levels.  However, House and Senate appropriations committee chairs have already indicated that they plan to write their bills according to the budget caps set last year, signaling that the President is unlikely to receive the additional $56 billion as part of his initiative. 

The release of the President's budget request marks the official start of the FY 2015 appropriations process.  Accordingly, House and Senate appropriations and authorizing committees have begun their oversight hearings, and appropriations chairs have set an ambitious timeline, with committee markups occurring as early as May and floor consideration over the summer.   In addition, Senate Budget Committee Chairwoman Patty Murray (D-WA) indicated last week that her committee will not prepare a budget resolution this year given the budget agreement produced last year that sets discretionary spending caps for FY 2015. However, she has expressed interest in working with House Budget Committee Chairman Paul Ryan (R-WI) to revisit the caps to address the priorities outlined in the President's initiative.  Chairman Ryan has focused his attention recently on critiquing federal entitlement programs and calling for a rewrite of federal anti-poverty programs. 

Many of the agency- and program-specific details are being reserved until agencies hold their respective budget briefings over the next few weeks.  COSSA will provide a full analysis of the President's FY 2015 budget request for federal agencies and programs of interest to the social and behavioral sciences community in our special budget issue in the coming weeks.  In the meantime, check out COSSA's agency-by-agency preliminary analysis.

Later this week, the House Science, Space and Technology Subcommittee on Research and Technology will consider legislation to reauthorize the National Science Foundation (NSF), called the Frontiers in Research, Science and Technology Act (H.R. 4186), or FIRST Act.  The bill would serve as a two-year authorization for NSF, running through fiscal year (FY) 2015.  In addition to authorizing overall funding levels for NSF in FY 2014 and FY 2015 (note: FY 2014 has already been appropriated), the legislation breaks from regular practice and would provide authorizations of appropriation for NSF's individual research directorates.  Of particular concern to the social and behavioral science community, the FIRST Act would authorize FY 2014 and 2015 funding levels for the Social, Behavioral and Economic (SBE) sciences directorate at $150 million, which is nearly 42 percent below SBE's current funding level.  The top-line authorization of appropriations for NSF in FY 2015 would be $7.279 billion under the FIRST Act, or a little more than one percent over the current level. In addition, the bill would place additional burden on NSF regarding its already-gold standard merit review process and require additional, potentially duplicative public disclosure of research grants.  Further, the bill seeks to micromanage the grant application process and limit the number of awards that can be made to principal investigators, thereby undermining the merit review process that successfully determines the very best science worth taxpayer support.  COSSA strongly objects to the FIRST Act in its current form.

On March 6, Science Committee Ranking Member Eddie Bernice Johnson (D-TX) introduced the America COMPETES Act of 2014, the committee Democrats' alternative to the FIRST Act.  In contrast to the Republican bill, the Democrats' bill seeks to maintain the current funding structure of NSF by authorizing a top-line appropriation for NSF and its research account without authorizing the individual directorates.  The bill would authorize NSF for five years, through FY 2019, with the budget growing by 5 percent each year.  Further, in a nod to efforts on the other side to target individual areas of science (i.e. social science), the Democrats' bill includes a "Sense of Congress" statement on support for all scientific fields (Sec. 302):

"It is the sense of Congress that in order to achieve its mission 'to promote the progress of science; to advance the national health, prosperity, and welfare; to secure the national defense...' the National Science Foundation must continue to support unfettered, competitive, merit reviewed basic research across all fields of science and engineering, including the social and behavioral sciences.

Despite objection by many in the scientific community to the FIRST Act, the bill is expected to pass through the Research and Technology Subcommittee on Thursday, likely along party lines.  Rep. Johnson could offer her bill as a substitute during the subcommittee or full committee markup, though her efforts are not likely to succeed.  

The report includes several recommendations related to social and behavioral science. Read COSSA's full analysis here. 

The level of interest, Philogene pointed out in his welcoming remarks, "bodes well for the utility and growing application of systems science methodologies to policy resistant health challenges, but more specifically for application of these tools and methods to population health and health disparities research." 

Read COSSA's full summary here.