78 



5^ / SUPPLEMENT 2 



Box II.4 

 Using the FS&T Budget Concept: Questions and Answers 



Why adopt a new budgeting concept for R&D policymaking? 



In a period of severe constraints on the federal budget and reduced allocations for R&D, it 

 is especially important to focus on the investment aspects of federal science and technolog>'. 

 The part of the R&D budget that supports science and key enabling technologies must be 

 identified and considered in overall terms by Congress and Executive Branch polic}'makers. It 

 is FS&T that expands the stock of knowledge about the physical, biological, and social world 

 and finds new ways to use that knowledge productively. Decision making on the rest of the 

 R&D budget concerns testing and evaluation of large technical systems prior to production, 

 and their subsequent modernization, and thus rests on different and shorter-term consider- 

 ations than do the criteria for allocating funds for FS&T as defmed in this repon. 



Will the new FS&T concept confuse people familiar with the conventional R&D numbers 

 that hatv been used since the early 1960s? 



Although continuity' and comparability in data series are useful for policy analysts, it is 

 more important for those making allocation decisions to have data that measure the right things. 

 The usefulness of FS&T data and the increased effectiveness of budgeting based on them will 

 more than outweigh the costs of implementing and learning how to interpret the new data 

 series. In any case.OMB and NSF can continue to collect and repon the traditional R&D totals, 

 of which FS&T data are a subset. That approach is similar to the one now being taken by NSF 

 and DOD in collecting data on the science and technology and the systems development parts 

 of R&D at DOD (see Table II. 1). 



Do available data allow for departments, agencies, OSTP, 0MB, and Congress to use the 

 FS&T budgeting concept practically and unambiguously? 



To implement the FS&T budget concept fully, some new data will have to be collected and 

 some new interpretations of existing data must be made by some agencies. However, the 

 agenc)' most affected by the new approach— DOD — already tracks its R&D activities in a way 

 that feeds directly into FS&T estimates. Making such determinations in DOE, NASA, and per- 

 haps other agencies should be relatively straightforward after experimentation with one or 

 two years' budgets. Some funding in higher categories may support the science and technol- 

 og}' base. Independent R&D funds in federal procurement contracts (which are no longer 

 reported fully) and some focilities and infrastructure elements may contain items that intu- 

 itively belong in FS&T. The Internet grew out of one such account, for example. Over time, 

 the FS&T concept and the data it generates will become a normal part of the budget process, 

 and the current imprecision signified by the committee's range estimate of $35 billion to $40 

 billion annually will narrow. 



Why not just use trends in the basic research or total research (basic and applied) 

 subcategories as a budget indicator for the science and engineering enterprise rather than 

 invent a new category? 



The strength of the FS&T budget concept is that it corresponds to the set of research and 

 technology development activities typically conducted in the science and engineering depart- 

 ments of U.S. research universities, many of the federal laboratories and FFRDCs, and some 

 private firms. Those institutions conduct a rich, interactive mix of investigations aimed at 

 discovering new knowledge of fundamental phenomena and their applications. Just looking at 

 basic research or even basic and applied research is too narrow for federal policymaking. 



