Last week, after much posturing in the beginning of March, Congress came to agreement on a “hybrid” spending bill for FY13 which has both the FY13 CR language as well as a handful of new appropriations bills. The combination bill puts into place new spending bills for the National Science Foundation (NSF), NASA, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), and the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST). Also included was the DoD spending bill.  All other agencies are funded through a year long CR which will continue “flat funding” at FY12 levels.  The bills do not take into consideration sequestration, so cuts of 5-7% will be placed on these final numbers.  The President is expected to sign the bill.

AAAS has complied a report based on the final numbers and sequestration cuts, which lay out how R&D spending fared through the FY 2013 sequester shockwave. Based on that analysis, federal R&D investment will equal about $130.9 billion in FY 2013, down from FY 2012.  Cut and paste the link below to see the report.

http://www.aaas.org/spp/rd/fy2013/

Last week the House passed the FY13 Continuing Resolution and the FY13 Department of Defense appropriations bill. The CR will extend funding for other government agencies at last year’s levels but include a 0.098% across-the-board reduction “to ensure that aggregate spending in the Act complies with the discretionary spending limits in the Budget Control Act of 2011.” The bill’s top-line discretionary spending is set at $1.043 trillion. It is on top of these funding levels that the federal departments and agencies will be subject to sequestration cuts.  The Senate will likely take action this week to move the appropriations process forward via a companion CR and avert a government shut down.

Sequestration went into effect on March 1st, after a 2 month “push back” from the original January 2nd deadline.  This time around there were no real last minute efforts on behalf of the leadership of Congress or the White House to avert the cuts with a “grand bargain”.  It appears that posturing aside sequestration will be in effect likely through the the fiscal year.  As mentioned previously the sequester is a 10 year budget cutting “worst case option” that was enacted in the Budget Control Act of 2011.  While the cuts are scheduled to be approximately 5-7% in discretionary spending,  due to the compressed nature of the cuts on FY13, it will be a much larger impact at 9-13%.  The University is anticipating a cut of 5.5 M dollars in FY13 alone and we will continue to press for the need to stop the sequester and urge Congress to come up with a “grand bargain”.