March 2022

On March 16, President Biden signed the FY 2022 omnibus appropriations legislation into law, with six months of the fiscal year passed.  While the final legislation did not meet the promising proposals to substantially boost funding for non-defense spending, the bill did include increases and important report language for key federal agencies that support education research. This table includes a full summary of the final budget numbers for the Institute of Education Sciences (IES), the National Science Foundation (NSF), and the National Institutes of Health (NIH).

IES saw an overall 14.7 percent increase over FY 2021, with a final FY 2022 amount of $737.02 million. The bulk of the increase accounted for a shift in funding for salaries and related expenses for IES from the main Department of Education Program Administration line to a new Program Administration line within IES. The FY 2022 final legislation included $67.09 million for IES Program Administration. In addition to this funding shift, the final legislation provided increases of $7 million for Research, Development, and Dissemination, $2 million for Research in Special Education, and $15 million for the National Assessment of Educational Progress.

In addition to the increased funding, the report language in the final agreement noted the lack of members on the National Board for Education Sciences and called for the Department of Education to address future plans for NBES in forthcoming congressional justifications.

NSF received $8.83 billion in the final agreement for FY 2022, representing a 4.1 percent increase over the FY 2021 amount. Within NSF, the Research and Related Activities (R&RA) line saw an increase of $250 million, and the Education and Human Resources (EHR) Directorate received a boost of $38 million.

As part of the report language, the final agreement provided support for the development of a new directorate within the R&RA account on Technology, Innovation, and Partnerships (TIP). NSF proposed this new TIP directorate in the FY 2022 budget request, which would receive existing funding such as that for the Innovation Corps and America’s Seed Fund together with funding for new programs intended to build partnerships for STEM innovation and scale-up, use-inspired research. NSF announced the launch of the TIP directorate on March 16.

NIH received $45 billion for FY 2022, representing a $2 billion, or 4.7 percent increase, compared to FY 2021 levels. Within NIH, the Eunice Kennedy Shriver National Institute of Child Health and Human Development (NICHD) received $1.68 billion, nearly a 6 percent increase. The final agreement also included $1 billion to fund the development of the Advanced Research Projects Agency for Health (ARPA-H) within the Department of Health and Human Services. By comparison, the FY 2022 budget proposed $6.5 billion for ARPA-H.

The delay in completing the FY 2022 appropriations process has contributed to the delay in the release of President Biden’s FY 2023 request. Details on the FY 2023 budget request are included in this March 2022 Highlights story.