Materials research advocacy affects the US federal budget
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Materials research advocacy affects the US federal budget www.mrs.org/advocacy By Kevin Whittlesey
This article is the first in a series from the Government Affairs Committee’s Advocacy Education and Outreach Subcommittee intended to inform the MRS community about important aspects of science advocacy.
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dvocating for strong budgets for federal agencies that fund materials research is central to the advocacy agenda of the Materials Research Society (MRS). But how does the process of determining the budget for particular federal agencies work, and how can we, the materials community, influence it? An important place to start is to understand what the total federal budget looks like. In FY 2016, the US federal budget was around $3.5 trillion. About two-thirds of that amount is socalled mandatory spending. Mandatory spending goes to programs such as Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid. Those programs are written into law in such a way that they continue to be funded each
year without any further action required by Congress. An additional 6% of the federal budget goes to pay interest on the national debt. That leaves about one-third of the budget as so-called discretionary spending. Congress has only that small piece of the budget to fund all other federal agencies and programs, including materials research programs that are of interest to MRS members. An important distinction to understand regarding the federal budget process is the difference between authorization and appropriation. An authorization is a law passed by Congress providing the federal government with the legal authority to fund a particular agency or program. An
Volunteers at the Materials Voice Booth at a MRS Meeting.
appropriation bill, by contrast, specifies the funds that will be given to and spent by a particular agency. For example, many MRS members are familiar with the Advanced Research Projects Agency-Energy (ARPA-E). Congress created, or authorized, ARPA-E in 2007 in the America COMPETES Act. That law stated that funds could be directed to ARPA-E, but the law was not able to provide funds. In 2009, ARPA-E received its first appropriation of $400 million. It is a two-step process, and advocacy groups, including MRS, often seek to influence aspects of authorization as well as appropriation bills. What are the steps involved with developing and passing the federal budget? The budget process begins with the president sending a budget request to Congress, usually in February, for the subsequent fiscal year, which begins October 1. Next, the House of Representatives and the Senate each draft and pass a budget resolution and reconcile the differences between the two, arriving at what is called a concurrent resolution. The budget resolution may or may not be aligned with the president’s wishes, as articulated in the budget request. The congressional budget resolution sets a roadmap for what Congress will spend across 20 broad categories, known as budget functions. These budget functions are sometimes referred to as “302(a) allocations,” name
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