At the end of last week, Congress passed into law the remaining appropriation bills for the second half of the Fiscal Year 2024 federal budget. As regular readers will recall, earlier this month Congress passed the initial batch of funding legislation, which contained the budgets for the National Science Foundation (NSF), Department of Energy Office of Science, National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST), and NASA. Those agencies received flat funding or significant cuts to their budgets. And, unfortunately, that trend continues with this second batch of funding legislation.

In terms of covered research agencies, this current set of bills includes the budgets for the Department of Defense (DOD) research accounts and the National Institutes of Health (NIH).

Let’s get into the details:

Department of Defense S&T

As with NSF’s final FY24 budget, there is no sugarcoating the news with the Defense research accounts: these are bad budgets. However, from a paradoxical viewpoint, they are generally better than what the Administration requested in March of last year. Before going into that, let’s get into the specific budget numbers.

All three of DOD S&T’s accounts do badly relative to their previous year’s budgets. Basic Research (6.1), which is the main Defense Department supporter of fundamental research at US universities, received a big cut of 10 percent; going from $2.92 billion in the FY23 to $2.63 billon in FY24, a cut of $290 million. The details within the 6.1 accounts paint a pretty grime picture: the Army, Navy, and Air Force’s “University Research Initiative” subaccounts are cut at 20, 27, and 10 percent, respectively.

The Applied Research (6.2) account is hit with a cut too, though not as significant. The 6.2 account received a 2.6 percent cut, going from $7.80 billion in FY23 to $7.60 billion in FY24, a loss of $200 million. Finally, Advanced Technology Development (6.3) would also receive a cut, going from $11.71 billion in FY23 to $11.29 billion in FY24, a cut of $420 million, or 3.6 percent.

DARPA is the only bright spot among the defense accounts, escaping any proposed cuts but getting flat funded. The agency would see a 1.5 percent, going from $4.06 billion in FY23 to $4.12 billion in FY24, an increase of $60 million.

Here is the paradoxical part: when compared against the President’s requested budgets (PBR), these accounts received increases (except DARPA which would receive a cut relative to the PBR). Here are the percent differences when comparing FY24 Final vs FY24 PBR:

DOD 6.1: +26 percent
DOD 6.2: +21 percent
DOD 6.3: +21 percent
DARPA: -6.1 percent

In many ways this is a reflection of two things. First, the President’s requested budget for the DOD research accounts was quite bad. And second, Congress upped the accounts from those requested budgets. So, from Congress’ perspective, they did these accounts a favor. This only demonstrates the importance of the Administration submitting a good request to start the process; otherwise, it’s easy to be in a budgetary hole that one never gets out of.

National Institutes of Health

Finally, we come to the National Institutes of Health (NIH). The agency would be a relative winner in FY24, escaping cuts but effectively flat funded. At the topline budget, the agency would go from $47.50 billion in FY23 to $48.68 billion in FY24, an increase of $1.18 billion or 2.5 percent. Additionally, ARPA-H (or Advanced Research Project Agency, Health) would be flat funded, receiving the same amount in FY24 that it received in FY23: $1.50 billion.

Conclusion

These budgets have already passed Congress and been signed into law by President Biden. For better or worse, Fiscal Year 2024 is finally complete.

As with the previous set of FY24 research budgets, this is not an ideal outcome to this budgetary year. In fact, FY24 has been a particularly zero-sum environment and that is reflected in the research accounts. Given the push to cut overall federal spending by certain factions within Congress, this outcome is not entirely unexpected. Keep in mind, House Republicans had adopted the position, at the beginning of 2023, to cut overall Federal spending to FY22 levels. A grim final budget for this year is not unexpected, but this is much worse than what either the House or Senate Appropriations Committees had been telegraphing during the year.

CRA has publicly voiced its concerns and frustrations with these budgets on behalf of the computing and information technology research community. We have pointed out the likely negative impacts these budgets will have on the country’s research enterprise, with the reduced quantity of research, the number of researchers, and the number of students educated in key fundamental areas of computing and other fields of discovery. It will also have negative impacts in areas of significant national interest like artificial intelligence, quantum computing, high-performance computing, and cyber security. All while our international competitors are doubling down on their investments in R&D. CRA will continue to make the case that the next fiscal year, Fiscal Year 2025, which the process is already underway, can’t follow down the road of cuts as far as research is concerned.