July 2013

During the week of July 8, congressional committees began the formal process of developing legislation for appropriating funds in the 2014 fiscal year for several agencies that fund education research: the National Science Foundation (NSF), the National Institutes of Health (NIH), and the Department of Education.  

National Science Foundation

The House Appropriations Committee reviewed the Commerce, Justice, Science, and Related Agencies (CJS) FY 2014 appropriations bill, which funds NSF, on July 17. The draft bill allocates $5.68 billion to research and related activities and $825 million to NSF’s Education and Human Resources (EHR) directorate. These figures represent an increase of $132.48 million and a decrease of $8.31 million from FY 2013 amounts for the respective programs.

The Senate Appropriations Committee considered its version of the FY 2014 CJS appropriations bill on July 18. The Senate version would fund NSF’s research and related activities at $6.02 billion and allocate $880 million to the EHR directorate. The Senate Appropriations Committee’s recommendation for the EHR directorate is at the level that President Obama requested in his FY 2014 budget.

Notably, neither bill includes the restrictions on funding for political science research written into the FY 2013 continuing resolution bill that was enacted in March.

National Institutes of Health and Department of Education

The Senate Appropriations Committee reviewed the appropriations bill, known as Labor-H, that details funding for the Departments of Health and Human Services and Education on July 11. Overall, NIH would be allocated nearly $31 billion, an increase of $307 million over 2013 appropriations. The Eunice Kennedy Shriver National Institute of Child Health and Human Development (NICHD) would receive $1.3 billion, an increase of $84.9 million over FY 2013.

The Institute of Education Sciences (IES) would be funded at $652.9 million, an increase of $90.3 million over FY 2013 funds. In addition, the Appropriations Committee included in its report on the bill a request for IES to include in its FY 2015 budget justification an account of how it will bring more focus and coherence to its investments and how those changes will solve specific problems of practice. The breakdown of allocations for specific IES program functions is shown in the table below with comparisons to final FY 2013 appropriations.

                        Proposed FY 2014 Appropriations for IES Compared With FY 2013

Program Function	Senate-Proposed FY 2014 Appropriations (in millions)	Final FY 2013 Appropriations (in millions)a	Amount Change (in millions)	Percentage Change
Research, development, and dissemination	$195.0	$179.9	$15.1	8.39%
Statistics	$112.0	$103.0	$9.0	8.74%
Regional Educational Laboratories	$57.3	$54.4	$2.9	5.33%
Special education research	$69.9	$47.3	$22.6	47.78%
Special education studies and evaluations	$11.4	$10.8	$0.6	5.56%
Statewide longitudinal data systems	$75.0	$36.1	$38.9	107.76%
Assessment	$124.6	$122.8	$1.8	1.47%
National Assessment Governing Board	$7.7	$8.2	-$0.5	-6.10%
IES Totalb	$652.9	$562.5	$91.4	16.07%

 ^a Final FY 2013 figures are from http://www2.ed.gov/about/overview/budget/budget13/13action.pdf.

 ^b Totals may differ due to rounding.

As a general provision, the Senate Labor-H bill mandates agencies or agency divisions covered in the legislation with over $100 million in research expenditures to create an open access repository similar to NIH’s PubMed Central for published research stemming from federal funds 12 months after publication.

The House Appropriations Committee has not yet announced a time frame for when the Subcommittee on Labor, Health and Human Services, Education, and Related Agencies will take up the House version of the Labor-H bill.