A Primer on the Federal Budget Process
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This division of funds directly pits against each other, funding for an unlikely assortiment of agencies. R>r example, once it gets its allowance, the House Appropriations Subcommittee on Energy and Water Development must balance energy R&D (including materials R&D in DOE) against dam projects. The subcommittee on vétérans, HUD and independent agencies must prioritize R&D in NASA and NSF against the exigencies of public housing and vétérans programs. If this sounds less than straightforward, you are correct. The Senate has the same setup. The upshot is that, unavoidably, Congress has no unified budgeting process for science. On the contrary, the budgeting process cuts across agencies and functions in a seemingly ad hoc way (from the viewpoint of an individual in research), reflecting the agencies assigned to a given appropriations subcommittee. Again, remember that the budgeting is top down, forcing the prioritization of funding for différent appropriations subcommittees, and for différent programs (and agencies) within thèse subcommittees.
The fédéral budget process is often regarded as the province of a sélect group of Washington insiders. This top-down budgeting process is the logical conséquence of the Gramm.Rudman législation passed in 1985, and reconfigured in 1987. This législation sets a multiyear schedule for allowable déficits ending in a balanced budget. While it has major built-in loopholes (proven by the persistence of our déficits), the point is that meeting a goal for a budget déficit requires total spending to be determined before the appropriations committees get into the act. If Gramm-Rudman is no longer with us next year (at least in its présent form) the top-down approach is likely to remain. The House and Senate authorization committees enter the budgeting process in a more indirect way. While an authorization bill is not needed to appropriate funds, such a bill, if enacted into law, sets ceilings for the amounts that can be appropriated. Normally, the authorization and
appropriations committees are in fairly close contact during the budget process, so major disconnects between the game plans of thèse committees are relatively rare. However, authorizing législation (to a greater extent than appropriations législation) is often used as a vehicle for législative direction to agencies—for example, organizational changes, Congressionally mandated reports, new review panels, restrictions on spending, and the like. Once the agencies get their budgets for the new fiscal year, they hâve to divide it among the différent program divisions, branches, etc. This is a critical point where the nitty-grirty décisions are made on detailed spending plans for materials R&D and other R&D activities. Since agencies hâve various continuing (and competing) internai priorities, a Congressional eut from the administration's original budget request for a given Une item generaUy gets spread to ail the component research programs—including materials research. Note that, with relatively few exceptions, Congress does not b
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