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Advocating for University Funding Priorities

FY 2024 Appropriations

Fiscal Year (FY) 2024 officially began on October 1, 2023, but the necessary spending bills weren’t finalized until March 22, 2024. The nearly six-month delay was largely due to continued partisan, and sometimes intra-party, disagreements on the overall spending limits for defense and non-defense programs. The resulting funding levels for 91������’s appropriations priorities are a mix of good and bad news, and the overall budget environment means that even flat funding was considered a win.��

The good news:

• Department of Energy’s Office of Science is among the winners, with a budget increase of approximately two percent to $8.24 billion.
• Title VIII Nursing Workforce Development Programs will receive an increase of $5 million, to $305.47 million.

Flat funding, but we’ll call it a win in this environment:

• National Institutes of Health at $47.1 billion (excluding funding for ARPA-H).
• ARPA-H at $1.5 billion.
• National Endowment for the Humanities at $207 million.
• The Dept. of Education's Title VI International Education at $85.7 million.
• Pell Grants Maximum Award at $7,395.
• Campus-based financial aid programs are also all held flat, despite earlier proposals to eliminate their funding completely.

The bad news:

• One of the biggest losers is the National Science Foundation which will drop approximately 8 percent compared to the total funding in FY 2023 – undoing the 12 percent boost the Foundation received last year to launch the new TIP Directorate. Last year’s increase relied on a special supplemental appropriation that Congress did not sustain this year. For FY 2024, NSF is funded at $9.06 billion.
• Overall, funding for Defense Basic Research is down 10 percent, to a total of $2.6 billion.
• NASA’s Science Mission Directorate is also cut about 6 percent to $7.33 billion, with the decrease falling entirely on the Planetary Science Division, which will drop 15 percent. The directorate’s Heliophysics, Earth Science, and Astrophysics Divisions will all have flat or nearly flat budgets.
• The Institute of Education Sciences would be cut a relatively small amount to $793.1 million, and the National Center for Special Education Research is flat funded at $64.26 million.

FY 2025 Appropriations

On March 11, the White House released their FY 2025 budget proposal. President Biden is seeking to raise the budgets of most non-defense science agencies for FY 2025, though the increases are dampened by the budget cuts Congress just made to many science agencies for FY 2024. As always, Congress is solely responsible for appropriating discretionary funds through the annual appropriations process.

While the President named many research priorities for his FY 2025 budget proposal, he was limited by capped discretionary spending under an earlier budget agreement with Republicans. As a result, the budget environment in FY 2025 is likely to be very similar to FY 2024, which means the President’s proposals could again be the high-water mark for many of our priorities. Among the most favored agencies in the request are NIST and NSF. Other major funders—including NIH, NASA, and DOE—would see smaller increases. The Administration requests steep cuts to the Department of Defense’s portfolio of early-stage S&T programs compared to FY 2023 enacted levels.

As Congress gets its appropriations process underway, OFR is actively advocating for 91������’s institutional priorities which have been submitted to the Tennessee congressional offices. This list of priorities was determined in coordination with campus leaders and includes the top-level funding for research agencies and federal student aid programs.