
John Podesta, a top clean energy adviser to President Biden, discusses funding from the Inflation Reduction Act during an event at Argonne National Lab on Nov. 4, 2022. (Image credit – DOE)
John Podesta, a top clean energy adviser to President Biden, discusses funding from the Inflation Reduction Act during an event at Argonne National Lab on Nov. 4, 2022. (Image credit – DOE)
In a familiar turn of events, fiscal year 2023 has begun with most science programs operating on stopgap funding that extends previous budget levels until Congress passes appropriations legislation for the full year. Democrats have already advanced bills that would boost budgets across most science programs, as detailed in FYI’s Federal Science Budget Tracker
Unlike last year, looming over those negotiations is the CHIPS and Science Act
Meanwhile, a number of programs are insulated from the vagaries of the appropriations process because they are already funded through the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act
DOE will receive around $25 billion through the infrastructure law for technology demonstration initiatives. Fiscal year 2023 is the second of six years the funding is spread across, with much of it set to be obligated during the earlier part of that period.
The department is already well into funding two large-scale demonstrations of nuclear reactor technologies
To administer this funding, DOE created an “infrastructure” branch
The Inflation Reduction Act is further transforming DOE, including by multiplying the loan authority
Today, the Office of Science released a list of the 52 projects
Much as DOE is being transformed by the infrastructure law and the Inflation Reduction Act, NIST has been assigned the enormous responsibility of stewarding the semiconductor initiatives funded by the CHIPS and Science Act.
Speaking last week at an advisory panel meeting
Of the total, $39 billion is for semiconductor manufacturing initiatives that will be administered by a CHIPS Program Office led by former Treasury Department official Mike Schmidt. The remainder will be overseen by a CHIPS R&D office led on an interim basis by Eric Lin, on detail from his position as head of NIST’s Material Measurement Laboratory.
Lin observed at the meeting that the funding is also spurring self-organization among its potential recipients, saying, “We’ve heard from our Industrial Advisory Committee members that fierce competitors are sitting down together and wondering what they could do together. Now, they didn’t get as far as deciding what to do, but the fact that they are having conversations and creating space for that bodes well, if we are able to execute well to take advantage of that energy.”
In stark contrast to the programs racing to scale up, programs on stopgap funding are constrained in what they can do by uncertainty surrounding their final appropriation level and a lack of authorization to start major new projects. The stopgap lasts until Dec. 16, but Congress could extend it should negotiators need more time to arrive at a finalized appropriation.
If negotiations follow past patterns, Republicans will compel Democrats to lower their proposed increases for nondefense programs and add more money for defense programs. Any shift in power after the election on Nov. 8 could further shape the final outcome. The twin threats of the Senate filibuster and a government shutdown usually bound how far either party tries to push its position, but Republicans’ hostility to the Biden administration could lead them
At the moment, a lobbying campaign
For example, the National Science Board, which oversees NSF, is campaigning for Congress to raise the agency’s budget from about $8.8 billion to the act’s $11.9 billion target. In a recent op-ed
Discussing the CHIPS and Science Act at the press roundtable, Berhe similarly remarked, “It’s huge, obviously. The authorization for the Office of Science is $50 billion over five years, along with a number of expanded roles. And my major priority here, a priority of everybody at the Office of Science, is to make sure that we work as hard as we possibly can to translate those authorizations into appropriations.”
The fiscal year 2023 target for the Office of Science is $8.9 billion, up from the current $7.5 billion budget. The target for NIST is over $1.5 billion, up from about $1.1 billion (with congressional earmarks subtracted). The CHIPS and Science Act also sets an $11 billion five-year budget target for a new program within the Commerce Department to promote regional innovation
While most attention in this year’s budget cycle is focused on actual and prospective large-scale increases, agencies are also awaiting clarity on more particular issues.
For instance, last year NIST’s budget became a repository for earmarked projects
The proposals House and Senate Democrats have put forward for basic research programs in the Department of Defense diverge markedly, with the former proposing a 6% cut and the latter a 22% increase. Last year, increases Republican secured in negotiations for defense spending resolved a similar divergence
Among science agencies, the picture for NASA’s budget is relatively straightforward. However, there is some question about whether Congress will follow the Biden administration