R&D in the FY 2001 Budget Request


The Administration's FY 2001 budget proposal, introduced on February 7, 2000, contains a wealth of new spending on health, human resources, access to technology, environment, infrastructure, and R&D initiatives and programs — an expansion of the federal sector that is supposed to secure the President's historical legacy. As the budget would exceed the caps currently imposed on discretionary spending, the President is expected to submit proposed legislation to remove those caps, a move that no longer entails the political risks it did in previous budget cycles. Reaction from the more vocal Republicans on Capitol Hill was predictable: "too much spending, not enough tax relief."


Overall Research & Development

The request features $85.3 billion for research and development, including facilities and equipment. That would be about 3 percent above estimated R&D spending in FY 2000, though civilian basic and applied research would each grow 7 percent under the plan.
R&D Funding by Sector & Type
FY 1999
Actual		 FY 2000
Estimate		 FY 2001
Proposed		 FY 00 - 01
% change
Civilian
   Basic Research 16,340 17,808 19,054 7%
   Applied Research 11,551 12,405 13,274 7%
   Development 8,522 8,818 8,981 2%
Defense
   Basic Research 1,128 1,219 1,274 5%
   Applied Research 4,364 4,788 4,752 -1%
   Development 35,780 35,253 35,340 --
Total
   Basic Research 17,468 19.027 20,328 7%
   Applied Research 15,915 17,193 18,026 5%
   Development 44,302 44,071 44,321 1%
   Facilities & Eqpt. 2,657 2,453 2,658 8%
 
TOTAL, R&D 80,342 82,744 85,333 3%
 (amounts in millions, current dollars)

R&D Themes & Crosscuts. When the President talks about his R&D budget, he is more likely to refer to the 21st Century Research Fund, a subset of overall R&D that encompasses the research budgets of the primary science agencies. (Don't be confused by the use of the word "fund" — it is not tied to a particular revenue stream nor does it entail any additional management structures.) Collectively, the programs included in the fund would total $42.9 billion in FY 2001, an increase of $2.8 billion or 7 percent over the current level; the White House uses the label "Science and Technology Initiative" to refer to the proposed increment.

The R&D budget proposal touts the following highlights and initiatives:

The nanotechnology and bioenergy initiatives represent new thrusts for FY 2001. The defense against new threats theme includes continued funding for the Critical Infrastructure Protection R&D initiative, in which 10 agencies participate. Its funding would grow from $461 million to $606 million in FY 2001, a 31 percent increase.


Information Technology R&D

IT R&D is a new interagency crosscut, though hardly a new theme, that combines the High Performance Computing and Communications program (HPCC), the Next Generation Internet initiative (NGI), and the short-lived Information Technology for the 21st Century initiative (IT2). (Also, a portion of the Department of Energy's Accelerated Strategic Computing Initiative (ASCI) and some base computing research programs not formerly counted as HPCC or IT2 are now included under the IT R&D umbrella.) Collectively, IT R&D programs would get nearly $600 million in new funding; the aggregate FY 2001 budget, $2.3 billion, would be about $1 billion more than FY 1999 spending.
Information Technology R&D Funding by Agency
FY 2000
Estimate		 FY 2001
Proposed		 FY 00 - 01
% change
National Science Foundation 517 740 43%
Department of Energy 517 667 29%
  Office of Science 120 190 58%
  Accelerated Strategic Computing Initiative 397 477 20%
Department of Defense 282 397 41%
  Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency 195 307 57%
  National Security Agency 77 80 4%
  University Research Initiatives 10 10 --
Dept. of Health & Human Services 191 233 22%
  National Institutes of Health 183 217 19%
  Agency for Healthcare Research & Quality 8 16 100%
NASA 174 230 32%
Department of Commerce 36 44 22%
Environmental Protection Agency 4 4 --
TOTAL, IT R&D 1,721 2,314 35%
 (amounts in millions, current dollars)
IT R&D priorities for FY 2001 include: teams to exploit advances in computing; infrastructure for advanced computational modeling and simulation; more reliable software; storing, managing, and preserving data; intelligent machines and networks of robots; ubiquitous computing and wireless networks; managing and ensuring the security and privacy of information; future generations of computers; broadband optical networks; social, economic, and workforce implications of IT; and educating and training a new generation of researchers.

Given the new classification, it is expected that the Administration will consolidate the various interagency coordination mechanisms for IT R&D programs.

Following are descriptions of the budget requests of the major players in federal IT R&D efforts.


National Science Foundation

The National Science Foundation budget request for FY 2001 is $4.6 billion, an increase of $675 million, the largest requested dollar increase in the agency's history and more than 17 percent above current funding. NSF Director Rita Colwell calls it a "21st century budget for 21st century science and engineering."
National Science Foundation Budget
FY 1999
Actual		 FY 2000
Estimate		 FY 2001
Proposed		 FY 00 - 01
% change
Research & Related Activities 2,821.6 2,958.5 3,540.7 19.7%
Education & Human Resources 662.5 690.9 729.0 5.5%
Major Research Equipment 56.7 93.5 138.5 48.2%
Administrative Expenses 149.5 154.3 164.2 6.4%
TOTAL, NSF 3,690.5 3,897.2 4,572.4 17.3%
 (amounts in millions, current dollars)

Focused Initiatives. The NSF is highlighting four focused initiatives in FY 2001, each of which would see its funding more than doubled.
NSF Focused Initiative Budgets
FY 2000
Estimate		 FY 2001
Proposed		 FY 00 - 01
% change
Information Technology Research 126.0 326.9 159%
Nanoscale Science and Engineering 97.3 216.7 123%
Biocomplexity in the Environment 50.0 136.3 173%
21st Century Workforce 73.7 157.0 113%
 (amounts in millions, current dollars)
The Information Technology Research initiative includes the following components: $190 million would be spent by the Computer and Information Science and Engineering directorate on its ITR activity; $45 million, from the Major Research Equipment line-item, is slated for the Terascale Computing Systems program to fund another node associated with the Partnership for Advanced Computational Infrastructure; and an additional $92 million would be scattered through the remaining NSF directorates. The initiative can also be disaggregated by function: $133 million for IT research; $101 million for IT infrastructure; $74 million for IT applications; and $19 million for IT education.

The NSF also participates in the most of the interagency R&D initiatives, with some funding coming from the NSF's focused initiatives and some from core programs. For instance, funding for the ITR initiative — as well as ongoing programs in HPCC, NGI, and other computing areas — are included in the IT R&D crosscut, to which NSF's aggregate contribution would be $740 million in FY 2001, an increase of 43 percent. NSF's role in the Critical Infrastructure Protection R&D initiative is slated to grow from $26 million to $33 million in FY 2001.

NSF Research. The NSF's total support for research would be expanded by nearly 20 percent, to more than $3.5 billion in FY 2001. While the increases for the focused initiatives account for about $490 million of NSF's overall proposed budget increase, for the first time in many years a portion of the funding increment would be used to strengthen investments in core disciplinary research, including computing research.

In another notable development, the current plans for FY 2000 and FY 2001 would catapult CISE over Biological Sciences and Engineering as the NSF's third largest research directorate.

NSF Research Directorate Budgets
FY 1999
Actual		 FY 2000
Estimate		 FY 2001
Proposed		 FY 00 - 01
% change
Biological Sciences 392.1 414.4 511.1 23.3%
Computer & Information S&E 298.6 388.4 529.1 36.2%
Engineering 370.1 381.8 456.5 19.6%
Geosciences 478.0 487.8 583.0 19.5%
Math & Physical Sciences 733.7 757.6 881.2 16.3%
Social, Behav., & Economic Sciences 142.0 146.1 175.1 19.8
Integrative Activities* 161.6 129.2 119.2 -7.7%
*includes Biocomplexity initiative and S& T Centers
 (amounts in millions, current dollars)

Computer and Information Science and Engineering. The budget request for the CISE Directorate is $529 million, an increase of about $141 million, or 36 percent, over estimated FY 2000 spending. Most of the increase, $100 million, would be for the Information Technology Research program; the remainder would be distributed among the traditional divisions and activities.
NSF Computer & Information Science & Engineering Budgets
FY 1999
Actual		 FY 2000
Estimate		 FY 2001
Proposed		 FY 00 - 01
% change
Computer-Communications Research 60.34 60.16 69.16 15.0%
Information & Intelligent Systems 41.22 41.62 53.70 29.0%
Experimental & Integrative Activities 57.57 57.62 63.32 9.9%
Advanced Computational Infrastructure 69.05 70.83 75.83 7.1%
Advanced Computational Research 9.00 7.27 8.32 14.4%
Advanced Networking Infrastructure 42.27 43.90 45.40 3.4%
Advanced Networking Research 19.11 17.42 23.37 37.3%
Information Technology Research 0 90.00 190.0 111%
TOTAL, CISE 298.55 388.42 529.10 36.2%
(amounts in millions, current dollars)
CISE's Information Technology Research (ITR) activity supports broad thematic, large-scale, long-term, basic computer science research, including research that entails a higher risk than that prevailing in established areas. Priority areas include: building "no-surprise," performance-engineered software and infrastructure systems; realizing broadband Internet access for tetherless devices; understanding, modeling, and predicting the behavior of networks; hardware/software co-design; multiplying individuals' physical and mental capabilities; meeting, working, and collaborating in cyberspace; building a ubiquitous content infrastructure for seamless retrieval of available information; and empowering computational discovery.

With the proposed FY 2001 increment, CISE would expand ITR to include support for connectivity programs; IT applications in biology; research to determine the reasons for the lower participation of women and minorities in IT education and career paths; research in interactive education; and mathematical methods underlying software, high confidence systems, large-scale networking, and high-end computing.

CISE also plans to participate in two of the other NSF-wide initiatives: $5 million would be spent on research in support of the Nanoscale Science and Engineering initiative in the following areas: quantum computing; self-assembly of biomolecular computer components; algorithms for extracting signals from noise in atomic force microscopy; nano-robotics; design automation tools; and nanoscale cellular automata. To the 21st Century Workforce initiative, CISE would contribute $1.25 million, up from $1.15 million in FY 2000, to support programs that encourage creative approaches to meeting U.S. IT workforce needs and participate in the Interagency Education Research Initiative.

Apart from the focused initiatives, CISE would also use $21 million of its increment to expand support for disciplinary research. Priority areas include: research in cognitive neuroscience to increase understanding of how the human brain performs computational types of actions such as recognizing faces or voices; research, demonstrations, and technical assistance on ways to make technology more accessible; research in methods for storage and access of scientific data to improve the use of existing resources; research on visualization and analysis for large, scientific data sets; research on new mechanisms for computing such as quantum devices and DNA or chemical based techniques; fundamental research on networking to address needs such as increased users, new types of services, increased complexity of protocols, and wireless networked devices; research in biological applications such as genome sequencing and database tools, protein motif recognition, biomolecular computing, computational biology, and hydrology and ecosystems modeling.

Another budget item slated for growth is research in support of the interagency Critical Infrastructure Protection R&D initiative. CISE would increase its contribution by $4 million (most expected to come from the ITR activity) to a total of $29 million in FY 2001. It would provide for research in networking, high performance computing, and software that will enable computer and communications systems to be safer, more reliable, and free from intrusions.

Across its programs, CISE intends to increase the average size of awards by 10 percent and the average duration of awards to 3.3 years to meet NSF-wide objectives for FY 2001.


Department of Defense

The Department of Defense's FY 2001 budget request for research, development, test, and evaluation (RDT&E) is $37.9 billion, down from estimated FY 2000 spending of $38.3 billion. However, basic research at DOD would increase by about 5 percent to $1.2 billion.

There are three DOD components included in the IT R&D crosscut: a portion of support from the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency for computing and communications R&D (see below); $80 million for the the National Security Agency's Advanced Research and Development Activity (ARDA), a joint effort of the Defense Department and the intelligence community to support long-term research on problems and enabling technologies relevant to intelligence and information security; and $10 million for fundamental IT research within the DOD-wide University Research Initiative, a competitive program managed through the office of the Director of Defense Research and Engineering.

DOD also participates in the Critical Infrastructure Protection R&D initiative; the National Security budget would be $463 million in FY 2001, up from current spending of $418 million.

Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency. While support for RDT&E would decrease at each of the service branches, DARPA's budget request, at just under $2.0 billion, is 4 percent more than the estimated FY 2000 budget. There are three DARPA line items related to computing: Computing Systems and Communications Technology, with an FY 2001 budget of $377 million, 17 percent more than current funding; Next Generation Internet, whose budget would shrink from $36 million to $15 million in FY 2001, as the NGI initiative begins to wind down; and Extensible Information Systems, a line-item created in FY 2000 to reflect DARPA's participation in IT2. As it did in FY 2000, DARPA is requesting $70 million for Extensible Information Systems, up from the FY 2000 appropriation of $30 million.


Department of Energy

The Department of Energy's theme for FY 2001 is "Strength through Science," and indeed, R&D programs would grow by 8 percent under its budget plan, from $7.1 to $7.7 billion. More than half of this R&D supports DOE's defense and nuclear weapons mission. Spending on civilian R&D programs, conducted through the Office of Science, would grow to $3.2 billion, up from $2.8 billion in FY 2000, a 13 percent increase. The office will emphasize a number of thrusts in FY 2001, including non-defense scientific supercomputing; nanoscale discovery, as part of the National Nanotechnology Initiative; and life sciences and bioengineering.

DOE's two computing programs — the Advanced Scientific Computing Research (ASCR) activity in the civilian Office of Science and the Accelerated Strategic Computing Initiative (ASCI), a component of the Nuclear Stockpile Stewardship program — would both see healthy budget increases in FY 2001.

The ASCR budget would grow from $128 million to $182 million, a 42 percent increase. Under the FY 2001 plan, ASCR would emphasize computer modeling and simulation R&D in several key areas of basic science including fusion, high energy physics, and genomics; development of scientific computing, networking and collaboration tools needed by DOE researchers; and advanced scientific software to enable unique, data intensive, collaboratories of the future and meet terascale software challenges. ASCI, funded at $510 million in FY 2000, would grow to $595 million in FY 2001.

Portions of both ASCR and ASCI funding are included under the IT R&D crosscut, as are some applications research efforts in other disciplines supported by the Office of Science.


National Institutes of Health

The NIH budget would total $18.8 billion in FY 2001, an increase of $1 billion or 5.6 percent above last year's funding level. One of NIH's budget thrusts is Fostering Interdisciplinary Research, and it includes a new Biomedical Information Science and Technology Initiative (BISTI). For several years now, the NIH has been emphasizing that progress in biomedical research depends on expertise from many disciplines beyond the traditional ones of biology and medicine, including computing and computational expertise. BISTI is designed to address those needs and will include support for National Programs of Excellence in Biomedical Computing Support; development of new tools and technologies to handle the increasing amount of biomedical data; training of bioinformatics specialists to address emerging research needs; and Centers of Excellence in Genomic Science. A portion of BISTI funding, $217 million in FY 2001, is counted as part of the IT R&D initiative.


National Institute of Standards and Technology

NIST's FY 2001 budget request is for $713 million, an increase of about 12 percent over its FY 2000 budget of $636 million. The proposal includes spending increments of $14 million to help to accelerate the transition to electronic commerce; and $60 million toward Critical Infrastructure Protection R&D, $50 million of which would go to establish an Institute for Information Infrastructure Protection (I3P). The Institute will engage in collaborations with industry and academia on key information infrastructure protection technologies, filling research and other key technology gaps that neither the private sector nor the government's national security community would otherwise address.

NIST laboratory funding for Computer Sciences and Applied Mathematics would grow by more than $10 million, to a total nearly $56 million. Of the increment, $5 million would be used to establish a team of computer security experts to help Federal agencies protect their information systems in accordance with White House directives on critical infrastructure protection; another $5 million would support research and development on new measurements, standards, test methods and guidelines that identify and remedy vulnerabilities to natural and intentional disruptions of the IT elements of the Nation's critical infrastructures; and $1 million would be used to provide a foundation of measurements and standards relating to advanced wireless communications technologies.

prepared by Lisa Thompson, CRA Director of Government Affairs


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