Democrats' Spending Plan Preserves Agricultural Research Funds and Supports NIH Roadmap Project
By JEFFREY BRAINARD
The Chronicle of Higher Education
February 6, 2007
Although a spending proposal in Congress would ax all earmarked projects for the remainder of this year, the plan unveiled this week would actually preserve for universities almost all of the $185-million set aside in last year's appropriations for agricultural-research earmarks. That and other details about the proposal, including its effect on National Institutes of Health grants and earmarks in other agencies, emerged on Tuesday.
As for the NIH, the plan's call for a 2-percent increase, to $28.9-billion, would help the agency expand the number of research-project grants awarded this year by nearly 10 percent, to roughly 10,000. That would reverse a decline in recent years.
Over all, higher-education officials were jubilant about the proposal, House Joint Resolution 20, unveiled by Congress's Democratic leadership on Monday (The Chronicle, January 30). The measure would increase spending for Pell Grants and scientific research for the rest of the 2007 fiscal year, which ends September 30. The House of Representatives is expected to approve the bill in a vote today and the Senate to do so in February.
But higher-education leaders were also bracing for the effect of the earmark moratorium. To pay for other priorities, appropriations-committee leaders raided some of the money set aside in 2006 for earmarks, the controversial, noncompetitive awards directed by members of Congress to universities and other constituents.
In the case of agricultural research, though, what the plan would take with one hand, it would give with the other.
The Democrats would remove $185-million in earmarks in the Department of Agriculture's Cooperative State Research, Education, and Extension Service. But, following sustained lobbying by land-grant universities, the appropriations committees agreed to keep that money within that agency in 2007, but to shift it to other, nonearmarked accounts. Over all, the service's budget would get no increase over 2006.
Most of the redistributed money would go to the service's Hatch Act program, which distributes funds to land-grant institutions according to a population-based formula. The Hatch program's budget would nearly double, to $322.6-million. Some of the shifted money, $9-million, would go to increasing to $190-million the budget for the National Research Initiative, the service's principal program of competitively awarded research grants.
However, some land-grant universities will be winners under this plan, while others will lose, said Ian L. Maw, vice president for food, agriculture and natural resources at the National Association of State Universities and Land-Grant Colleges. The losers will include institutions that got more money through earmarks in 2006 than from other department programs like the Hatch Act funds, he said.
"I think that it will be a tough row to hoe, but some of them will finds ways in their own budgets and using state money to keep these projects going" in 2007, he said.
Fulfilling the hopes of some university officials, the spending plan does not prohibit federal agencies from choosing voluntarily to continue financing projects that were supported by Congressional earmarks in past years, a Congressional staff member said on Tuesday, speaking on condition of anonymity. Those could include projects that agencies consider beneficial. Congress provided more than $2-billion in earmarks to universities and colleges in the 2003 fiscal year, the last for which The Chronicle calculated a grand total.
However, any voluntary spending is likely to vary by federal agency, and the outcome cannot be predicted, the staff member said. The appropriations committees proposed diverting formerly earmarked spending for some agencies to unrelated nonacademic programs. But in other agencies, the plan would leave the earmarked funds in place. For example, the Energy Department would retain the $130-million appropriated for research earmarks in the agency's Office of Science in 2006.
President Bush proposed in his State of the Union address last week that earmarked spending be cut in half, not eliminated, the staff member pointed out, adding that "the president can choose the ones he thinks are worthwhile" to save.
Federal agencies will have to balance conflicting priorities in deciding whether to spend their limited funds in 2007 on earmarked projects. The proposed plan provides only half the funds needed for a scheduled pay raise of 2 percent for federal workers, and no money to cover increases in other operating costs, like rent.
Among other details that emerged on Tuesday, the proposal provides financing for the Survey of Income and Program Participation. This federal survey is considered the nation's only large-scale, longitudinal source of data on poverty, unemployment, and disability and on the impact of government programs on households. The program had been targeted for elimination under President Bush's budget plan for 2007, drawing protests from social scientists who were concerned about the potential loss of the data it collects (The Chronicle, March 2, 2006, and June 21, 2006).
As for the NIH, the plan offers an increase totaling $620-million, which would strengthen the power of the agency's director to influence grant-making but also give a small raise for the agency's 27 autonomous institutes and centers, according to appropriations-committee documents.
Nearly $500-million of that money would go to the agency's Office of the Director for a program of bold, interdisciplinary research projects that has been controversial in some quarters of academe. Critics have worried that the program, called the Roadmap for Medical Research, was diverting money from traditional biomedical-research projects at universities while the percentage of grant applications approved by the NIH has dropped in recent years because of tight budgets. Supporters, including the agency's director, Elias A. Zerhouni, have said the program is essential to translating advances in fundamental biomedical research into new medical treatments.
Until now, the institutes and centers have contributed 1 percent of their annual appropriations to finance the Roadmap program, but the proposed spending plan for 2007 would allow them to keep that money. The Roadmap project would get a net spending increase of about 46 percent over the 2006 level.
In addition, part of the proposed increase would help the NIH increase the number of scientists receiving their first-ever NIH grants by 1,500.
In other news about the bill, the Bush administration issued a statement on Tuesday urging the House to add funds for scientific research at the Department of Energy's Office of Science, the National Science Foundation, and the National Institute of Standards and Technology.
In his 2007 budget plan unveiled a year ago, President Bush proposed starting to double spending on physical-sciences research at those agencies over a decade. The bill introduced this week, however, contains only about half the $900-million in new spending that Mr. Bush requested for this effort, which he dubbed the American Competitiveness Initiative.
The administration's statement said the full amount requested by the president was needed "to rapidly improve the nation's economic security through research in areas such as high-end computing and nanotechnology."
