On May 28th 2021, President Joe Biden released his $6 trillion request for the FY 2022 Federal Budget. A series of blogs analyzing the new budget was posted on the Computing Research Association’s Policy Blog. The budget reflects the new administration’s commitment to science with a 9% increase for Federal investments in government research and development including the following:
- nearly 20% increase for the National Science Foundation and the creation of a new Directorate of Technology Innovation and Partnerships (TIP) that would focus on technology development and transitioning federally funded research to the marketplace.
- 7% increase for funding to NASA
- 6% increase for DOE’s Office of Science
- 45% increase in NIST
- 21% increase in the National Institutes of Health
National Science Foundation
Under the President’s FY22 plan, NSF funding will increase from $8.49 billion to $10.2 billion, an increase of 19.8%. Funding for Research and Related Activities (R&RA), a subaccount that funds the majority of the agency’s research portfolio, would increase at a similar rate of 17.8%. Education and Human Resources (EHR), another subaccount that contains the agency’s education programs, will also see a large increase of 33%. Lastly, the Computer and Information Science and Engineering Directorate (CISE), home for most computer research support, will receive an 11% increase. That increase would be roughly evenly divided across the directorate with noteworthy major investments in Advanced Manufacturing, Advanced Wireless Research, Artificial Intelligence (including the AI Research Institutes program), and Secure and Trustworthy Cyberspace, Clean Energy Technology, Microelectronics and Semiconductors, and Quantum Information Science.
You can read more about NSF’s budget details here.
Department of Energy
Two key components for computing research in the DOE are the Office of Science (SC), which houses the agency’s basic research support and the Advanced Research Projects Agency-Energy (ARPA-E). They saw a 5.8% and a 17% increase, respectfully, with a new initiative within the SC called Reaching a New Energy Science Workforce (RENEW) that aims to, “target efforts to increase participation and retention of underrepresented groups in SC research activities.”
Unfortunately, the SC’s Advanced Scientific Computing Research (ASCR) program – home to most of SC’s computing research programs only saw a 2% increase.
You can read more about the DOE’s budget details here.
Department of Defense
Despite the increased funding for non-defense research, defense research agencies did not fare as well. The DOD’s Science and Technology (DOD S&T) program is made up of three accounts: 6.1 (basic research), 6.2 (applied research), and 6.3 (advanced technology development). These programs received heavy cuts in the FY22 budget request, with a 14.5 decrease for 6.1 and 6.2 and an 11.1% decrease for 6.3. DARPA funding was not cut but only received a 0.8% increase.
You can learn more about the DOD cuts here.
