FY21 Begins With Stopgap Budget and Stalled COVID Relief

Just before fiscal year 2021 began on Oct. 1, Congress passed legislation that will fund the federal government through Dec. 11, staving off a shutdown. The measure permits science agencies to continue operating at their fiscal year 2020 budget levels, but they will not be able to initiate major new programs and projects. Agencies also generally spend funds cautiously until they are allocated their final budgets for the entire fiscal year.

While it has become common for Congress to use one or more stopgap measures before finalizing the annual budget, this year the process has been unusual in that Senate appropriators never released their drafts of the 12 bills that assign agencies their new budgets. The House released their appropriations bills this spring and passed most of them over the summer.

With the November election fast approaching and Republicans focused on the confirmation of President Trump’s Supreme Court nominee, there is a chance the Senate will simply not release its spending bills and instead work behind closed doors to reach a final agreement with the House. The last time this happened was when the House did not release its proposals during a deadlock over overarching federal spending levels for fiscal year 2011 that ultimately resulted in the enactment of a full-year stopgap.

The election makes the situation particularly difficult to predict this year, as any changes in control over the White House or either chamber of Congress would significantly alter the dynamics of the negotiations. However, whatever the result, Congress is unlikely to accede to the Trump administration’s request for across-the-board cuts to science agencies, having rejected them on a bipartisan basis in previous years. The below chart compares the request with the House’s proposals for fiscal year 2021.

The House legislation also includes tens of billions of dollars in “emergency” funding to spur economic recovery from the pandemic, some of which would go to the Department of Energy and National Institutes of Health. However, House Republicans have strongly objected to using the regular appropriations bills for this purpose, arguing that any recovery funds should instead be negotiated through pandemic-specific legislation.

Outlook for research recovery funds in flux

Congress remains at an impasse over coronavirus recovery measures. Last week, the House passed a roughly $2 trillion bill that is a trimmed-down version of the $3 trillion HEROES Act it approved in May. However, the overall pricetag of the revised bill is still well above that of the HEALS Act introduced in July by Senate Republicans. Neither the HEALS Act nor a narrower proposal the Republicans advanced in September gained enough support to clear the Senate’s filibuster threshold of 60 votes.

While House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) and Treasury Secretary Steve Mnuchin have expressed cautious optimism that the House and Senate could soon reach a bipartisan agreement on a proposal, Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY) warned last week the sides remain “very, very far apart.”

In any case, though, both sides have been receptive to including some recovery funds in the legislation for science agencies to address project disruptions. Notably, the latest House bill includes additional funding for DOE and the National Science Foundation that was absent from the original HEROES Act.

Specifically, NSF would receive $2.9 billion, largely directed toward “extensions of existing research grants, cooperative agreements, scholarships, fellowships, and apprenticeships.” DOE would also receive $143 million to offset additional costs incurred by five projects: the Large Synoptic Survey Telescope Camera, Linac Coherent Light Source II, Muon to Electron Conversion Experiment, Super Cryogenic Dark Matter Search, and a new data center at Brookhaven National Lab.

As in the previous HEROES Act, NIH would receive $4.7 billion, of which at least $3 billion would go toward offsetting costs related to reductions in lab productivity. In the Senate, the HEALS Act includes $10 billion for addressing such disruptions at NIH as well as $1.5 billion for NASA. It does not include recovery funds for NSF or DOE, though it does propose giving the DOE Office of Science $306 million for research on COVID-19.

Even when taken together, both sides’ bills largely fall short of the targets proposed in the bipartisan RISE Act , which recommends Congress distribute about $25 billion in research recovery funds across science agencies. For details on all proposals on the table, see FYI’s Federal Science Budget Tracker .