Continuing our coverage of the Fiscal Year 2025 (FY25) federal budget process, we turn to the Senate Appropriations Committee’s Energy and Water bill. This bill contains the budgets for the Department of Energy’s Office of Science (DOE SC) and ARPA-E. The Senate Appropriators supported the President’s requested budget from March and provided generous funding increases for the Office of Science and ASCR. This is contrast to the lower funding levels the House appropriators recommended with their budget plan.

The Senate bill proposes a 4.7 percent increase for the Office of Science over FY24 enacted levels, bringing the agency’s budget to $8.60 billion for FY25 (an increase of $360 million). Within the Office of Science, the Advanced Scientific Computing Research (ASCR) program, which houses the majority of the computing research at DOE, would see a substantial increase of 12.7 percent – going from $1.02 billion in FY24 to $1.15 billion for FY25. These numbers are substantially the same as what the Department requested for their budgets. The Senate appropriators made a point of calling out scientific discovery and Chips & Science Act implementation as priorities in their bill, saying it, “continues to advance the highest priorities in materials research, high-performance computing, artificial intelligence, biology, and clean energy research to maintain and strengthen our global competitiveness.”

In the committee’s report, the Senate appropriators continued their support for the agency’s efforts in artificial intelligence and quantum information sciences. For AI specially, they are recommending a new line item of $100 million for artificial intelligence and machine learning efforts, and voicing support for the Department’s new Frontiers in Artificial Intelligence for Science, Security, and Technology [FASST] initiative. The appropriators also recommend no less than $160 million for AI efforts across the Office of Science, with a leadership role for ASCR, and encouraged DOE, “to apply those capabilities to the Office of Science’s mission with a focus on accelerating scientific discovery.” Within ASCR, support is voiced for the program’s Mathematical, Computational and Computer Sciences research efforts. Finally, the Senate directs DOE to establish, “a hybrid High-Performance Computing [HPC]/Quantum Computing Pathfinder Program at a Leadership Computing Facility,” in order to allow the LCF to, “to acquire an on-premise quantum computer…to begin to study how to effectively interface and integrate quantum processing units with traditional HPC resources.”

The Senate appropriators also voiced their support for the Office of Science’s engagement plans with HBCUs and MSIs, with particular praise for the agency’s RENEW and FAIR programs. This is in contrast to the House’s plans which eliminated funding for the programs. The Senate budget mark also support’s DOE’s EPSCoR program, recommending $35 million.

Finally, the Advanced Research Projects Agency – Energy, or ARPA-E, would receive a light cut of a million dollar, or a reduction of 0.2 percent compared to FY24 enacted levels. The agency would go from $460 million in FY24 to $459 million under the Senate’s FY25 plans. That is above both the President’s request and the House’s mark.

The Senate Appropriations Committee unanimously approved their Energy and Water legislation on August 1st; the bill now heads to the full chamber for consideration. As we have mentioned before, we are not expecting the Fiscal Year 2025 budget to be completed until after the November election. And the results of that election could mean that finalizing FY25 is punted until the new Congress in the next calendar year. We will have to wait and see what happens. CRA will continue to monitor the situation and report on any new develops; please keep checking back for the latest news.