NSF REPORTS FEDERAL FUNDING OF R&D CENTERS HAS DECLINED

FROM:  NATIONAL SCIENCE FOUNDATION
Federally funded R&D center spending declined, latest figures say

Spending has fallen since one-time federal infusion of funds in fiscal year 2009
The majority of the nation's federally funded R&D centers (FFRDCs) reported spending less on research and development in fiscal year 2013 than they had the previous year, according to a new InfoBrief from the National Science Foundation's National Center for Science and Engineering Statistics (NCSES).

The report details that the 40 federally-funded centers spent $16.9 billion on research and development in fiscal year 2013. Of those, 24 reported declines from fiscal year 2012, and 17 reported two straight years of decreased spending.

Federal funding for the centers has been declining since a high of $18 billion in total spending was reported in fiscal year 2010. That peak corresponded with the one-time American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 (ARRA), which accounted for more than $1 billion of federal R&D expenditures to FFRDCs in fiscal year 2010. In contrast, ARRA-funded expenditures to all FFRDCs combined amounted to $170 million in fiscal year 2013, or 1 percent of federal R&D expenditures.

Basic research accounted for 24.8 percent of total FFRDC research and development expenditures in fiscal year 2013, a significant drop from the reported 35.2-percent share for the previous year. A major contributor to that decrease was a re-evaluation of the reported distribution of activities by Los Alamos National Laboratory. Five of the 40 laboratories--Los Alamos, Sandia, Oak Ridge, Lawrence Livermore and the NASA-sponsored Jet Propulsion Laboratory--account for half of the total reported R&D spending.

FFRDCs are privately operated organizations that the government funds exclusively or substantially. Since 2001, federal funding accounted for over 96 percent of their total R&D spending.

See more from this report: Majority of Federally Funded R&D Centers Report Declines in R&D Spending in FY 2013.

For more information and statistical products please visit NSF's National Center for Science and Engineering Statistics.

-NSF-
Media Contacts
Rob Margetta, NSF,

DARPA SEEKS TECHNOLOGY THAT CHANGES OUTCOMES

Above:  The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency is seeking to develop the next generation of search technologies to revolutionize the discovery, organization and presentation of search results. The Memex program ultimately would apply to any public-domain content. Initially, DARPA plans to develop Memex to address a key Defense Department mission: fighting human trafficking. An index curated for the countertrafficking domain, along with configurable interfaces for search and analysis, would enable new opportunities to uncover and defeat trafficking enterprises, officials explained. DARPA photo.

FROM:  U.S. DEFENSE DEPARTMENT  

DARPA Sows Seeds of Technological Surprise, Director Says

By Cheryl Pellerin

American Forces Press Service

WASHINGTON, April 30, 2014 – Many of the advances that contribute to national security resulted from early investment in developing new technologies, the director of the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency told Congress yesterday.

Dr. Arati Prabhakar represented the Defense Department at a Senate Appropriations Committee hearing called to address concern that the national investment in research and development had shrunk since 2001, along with the education pipeline for young scientists and engineers.

The directors of the Office of Science and Technology Policy of the Executive Office of the President, the National Science Foundation, the National Institutes of Health and the Energy Department also testified at the hearing.

“DARPA is part of Defense Department science and technology investments,” Prabhakar said. “We're also part of this much larger national ecosystem for R&D. But within those communities, we have one very specific role: to make the pivotal early investments that change what's possible so we can take big steps forward in our national security capabilities.”

DARPA’s output is technology, but the organization counts its mission complete only when the technologies change outcomes, she added.

“Every time a stealth fighter evades an air defense system, every time a soldier on the ground is able to place himself precisely with GPS and get the data he needs, every time a radar on an aircraft carrier allows us to see a threat to a carrier strike group before it sees us -- that's when we count our mission complete,” Prabhakar said.

In every case, DARPA made a pivotal early investment that showed the technologies were possible, and what followed from that, Prabhakar said, was equally important.

“That was the investment, often by our partners in other parts of the Defense Department and the military services -- their science and technology investments, their development investments or their acquisition programs,” the director said. “Of course,” she added, “many in industry were involved deeply in those efforts, and ultimately to make those technologies into real capabilities for our warfighters.”

Along the way, as DARPA focused on its mission of investments for national security, the organization’s scientists and engineers planted some of the seeds that formed the technology base that the U.S. commercial sector has built layer on layer above the foundation, Prabhakar said.

“Every time you pick up your cell phone and do something as mundane and miraculous as check a social networking site, you're living on top of a set of technologies that trace back to that early work we did,” she added. “Public investment laid that foundation. Billions of dollars of private investment and enormous entrepreneurship is what built those industries and ended up changing how we live and work with these technologies.”

DARPA’s mission of creating breakthrough technologies for national security is unchanged across more than five decades, she told the panel, but the world in which DARPA invests and pursues its mission continues to change, and so do the things DARPA does that reflect the national security and technology context in which the organization must operate today.

“In one arena, we see information at massive scale affecting every aspect of national security,” the director said. “So if you look in our portfolio today, you will find game-changing investments in cyber and in big-data programs.” One example is work DARPA is doing to tackle the networks that drive human trafficking around the world, she added.

In another arena, Prabhakar said, DARPA is looking at what's happening with the cost and complexity of military systems today.

“We recognize that [such systems] are becoming too costly and too inflexible to be effective for the next generation of threats we will face around the world,” Prabhakar explained, “so at DARPA we are investing in programs that are fundamentally rethinking complex military systems.”

DARPA is investing in technology its experts believe will lead to powerful new approaches for radar, communications, weapons and navigation, she said.
“And in a range of research areas, we can see the new seeds of technological surprise,” Prabhakar said. “One example is where biology is intersecting with engineering today, and in areas like that, we are making investments that will lead to new technologies like synthetic biology and neurotechnology.”
Another expert who testified before the committee, National Institutes of Health Director Dr. Francis S. Collins, mentioned a breakthrough neuroscience project that Stanford University is working on with funding from NIH and DARPA and the National Science Foundation.

“Traditionally, researchers have studied the postmortem brain by cutting a specimen into slim slices. While all that slicing generates neat, two-dimensional images, it also makes it impossible to reconstruct the connections of the brain's tens of billions of neurons,” Collins said. “What if we could study the details of the wiring and the location of specific proteins in transparent 3-D?

“Using a chemical cocktail,” he continued, “researchers at Stanford University -- supported by NIH, NSF and DARPA -- have figured out a way to do just that. They've dubbed their technique ‘Clarity,’ and in an extraordinary technical feat, the team made possible a 3-D tour of an intact mouse brain illuminated by a green dye that marks the neurons.”

Clarity is now being applied to human brains, he added, and undoubtedly will advance the BRAIN Initiative, a research effort unveiled by President Barack Obama and Collins in April 2013. In his State of the Union message last year, the president addressed research and development and its value to the nation.
“If we want to make the best products, we also have to invest in the best ideas,” Obama said. “Every dollar we invested to map the human genome returned $140 to our economy -- every dollar. Today, our scientists are mapping the human brain to unlock the answers to Alzheimer’s. They’re developing drugs to regenerate damaged organs, devising new material to make batteries 10 times more powerful.
“Now is not the time to gut these job-creating investments in science and innovation,” Obama added. “Now is the time to reach a level of research and development not seen since the height of the space race.”

During her testimony yesterday, Prabhakar also discussed the nature of the world today and its relation to research and development.

“In many ways we are living in very challenging times,” she said. “Technology is getting more and more complex, [and] it's moving at a very rapid pace. Other nations are jockeying for position in global affairs, and many of them … are making their own aggressive moves to build their own science and technology capabilities.”

Meanwhile, here at home, she added, many are dealing with constrained resources, and many agencies are dealing with the corrosive effects of sequestration.

“But when I step back and look at what we have done over many decades in this country, I would observe that we have had a long and very successful commitment to investing in R&D as a nation,” the director told the panel. “And when we make that investment in R&D, we are investing in two things that are deeply American.”
One is the kind of creativity sparked by the open society that is the hallmark of the United States, she said, and in this case the nation is investing in the creativity of its scientists and engineers.

“The second thing is this drive to create a better future,” Prabhakar added. “And in a sense, this is the most productive kind of restlessness you could possibly imagine.”

DEFENSE OFFICIAL SAYS MILITARY COMPENSATION GROWTH RATE MUST BE SLOWED

DOD photo by Erin A. Kirk-Cuomo.

Right:  Acting Deputy Defense Secretary Christine H. Fox answers a question as Navy Adm. James A. Winnefeld Jr., vice chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, listens during testimony before the Senate Armed Services Committee in Washington, D.C., Jan. 28, 2014. Fox and Winnefeld addressed the current budget environment and the possible requirement to slow the rate of growth in military compensation. 

FROM:  DEFENSE DEPARTMENT
Fox Says DOD Must Slow Growth of Military Compensation
By Jim Garamone
American Forces Press Service

WASHINGTON, Jan. 28, 2014 – The Defense Department must slow the rate of growth in military pay and compensation or the organization will not be able to fight and win the nation’s wars, Acting Deputy Defense Secretary Christine H. Fox said here today.

Fox, testifying before the Senate Armed Services Committee, said DOD must get a handle on pay and benefits or risk sending service members into harm’s way unprepared.

The deputy thanked the senators for supporting the Bipartisan Budget Act, which she said mitigates the worst of the problems DOD faces under the Budget Control Act of 2011. Still, she added, it only goes through the next two years, and this is a long-term problem.

“Beyond those two years, the BCA remains the law of the land,” she said. “If sequestration is allowed to persist, our analysis shows that it will lead to a force that is too small, inadequately equipped and insufficiently trained to fully defend the nation’s interests.”

Given this budgetary background, DOD civilian and military leaders have said time and again that the one-third of the defense budget consumed by military compensation cannot be exempt as an area of defense savings. “We must find ways to slow the rate of growth,” Fox told the committee.

Inflation-adjusted pay and benefit costs are 40 percent higher than in 2001, even though the active force today is just slightly larger. Defense health care costs alone have grown from less than $20 billion in 2001 to nearly $50 billion in 2013. Payments for housing costs also have increased faster than inflation.
“If this department is going to maintain a future force that is properly sized, modern and ready, we clearly cannot maintain the last decade’s rate of military compensation growth,” Fox said.

Military service is about more than just a paycheck. The jobs and service military personnel perform are as important. If the department doesn’t have money to maintain equipment, or supply the latest technology, or get service members the latest and best training “then they are being done a disservice,” the deputy said.
“When they’re sent into harm’s way, this disservice can quickly transition into a breach of trust,” Fox said. “Here I am referring to our collective, sacred obligation to provide our troops with the finest training and equipment possible, so that they can deploy to combat able to accomplish their mission and return to their families.”

The department does have recommendations for slowing the growth of compensation fairly and effectively, Fox said. “Most notably, just this year, Congress accepted a 1 percent basic pay raise, even though the employment cost index called for an increase of 1.8 percent. We are currently reviewing all military pays and benefits, and may offer further proposals.”

Fox spoke directly to the “COLA-minus-one” or “CPI-minus-one” provision included as part of the Bipartisan Budget Act. The provision required capping cost-of-living raises in retirement pay for working-age military retirees at 1 percent below inflation, as measured by the Consumer Price Index.

“To my knowledge, no DOD officials were consulted on the details of the BBA, including the CPI-minus-one provision,” she said. “The department fully supported the changes made to the provision to exempt military disability retirement and survivors.”

The department does support a comprehensive review of this provision, the acting deputy defense secretary said, including its effect on retirees not currently exempted. “If the Congress decides to retain the CPI-minus-one approach, we strongly recommend it be modified to include ‘grandfathering,’” she said.
Fox called on Congress to refrain from changing military retirement until the Military Compensation and Retirement Modernization Commission presents its final report in February 2015.

“There are many ways we might change military retirement, including more fundamental reforms,” she said. “Because the CPI-minus-one provision does not go into effect until December 2015, there is ample time for such a careful review, including waiting for the commission to provide its input.”