CAPITAL HILL POLITICS (Washington Insider Magazine) – Congressional leaders recently created a 2022 spending bill that would be giving additional aid to U.S. research agencies, albeit below requested funding levels. Congress is additionally pouring resources into determining additional legislation for several new science agencies that could be commissioned under further bills and formal notices.
Currently, the spending bill sits at 2741 pages. If approved, it would abate the freeze that was imposed at the start of the recent fiscal year, beginning on October 1st of 2021. Throughout the current year, Congress operated governmental agencies and operations through resolutions only, in lieu of a finalized and completed budget.
Because of this, it is likely that they will continue to need additional resolutions through the end of March and the beginning of early April. While the freeze did keep the government functional through some of the most volatile months of the pandemic and of foreign policy disruption, the freeze also stopped agencies from continuing in their programs or expanding initiatives. This applies to the Advanced Research Projects Agency for Health, which was designed to seek out new opportunities in precision medicine based on a directorate from the National Science Foundation, or NSF.
With the newly proposed spending bill, the National Institute of Health’s budget would increase by over 5%. This equates to billions of dollars in additional funding, which would give growth to its various national institutes. The bill would also give additional funding to the Department of Health and Human Services. This money would then go into the additional support and formation costs of the Advanced Research Projects Agency for Health, otherwise known as ARPA-H.
This science funding wouldn’t stop there. The National Science Foundation would also receive a sizeable boost in budget, raising its annual spending projections by an additional 8 million dollars. While this would go toward operating budget and additional costs, there would ne no new programs formed within its purview or directorate.
Additionally, the Department of Energy’s Office of Science would get additional funding, as well as NASA’s science program. Other agencies that are nongovernmental in nature, or that are a lesser size, would also see finding increases with this plan, most notably of which would include the National Institute of Standards and Technology or NIST. There would also be an additional 6% funding boost that would be funneled to the U.S. Geological Survey for different related initiatives.
The Biden Administration is also using this bill as an opportunity to grow civilian and defense spending at nearly the same rates. While this wasn’t initially the goal of this spending bill when it was originally proposed by President Biden to Congress last spring, the recent developments with foreign policy between the United States and China, the United States and Iran, and the ongoing Russian-Ukrainian war have fueled this decision.
The result was a subsequent boost to the package that would pour an additional 16% boosted funding amount into infrastructure in preparation for defensive maneuvers should the situation require it. This was spearheaded by conservative influence, as President Biden’s main goal was to boost scientific advancement budgets only.
