washington

A congressional committee has created alarm among many leading US research universities by calling for a major redirection of Pentagon money away from basic research, and for this money to be used to restore the sagging budget for developing and deploying new weapons systems.

The national security appropriations subcommittee in the House of Representatives has cut the Clinton administration's budget request for basic research at the Department of Defense (DoD) from $1.16 to $1.03 billion. The sub-committee argues that the military services need the money for weapons modernization.

The bill would transfer most of the money from the basic research budget, which is largely spent in the universities, to exploratory development, which is done in the DoD and industrial laboratories.

News of the proposed cut alarmed universities, which are more heavily dependent on DoD funds than is sometimes realized. The Massachusetts Institute of Technology, for example, gets about $60 million a year from DoD — one-fifth of all of its research funds, or about the same as it gets from the National Institutes of Health. Predictably it is the engineering and computer science departments that rely most heavily on DoD money.

University representatives meeting in Washington last week agreed to fight the House plan during the congressional recess, in the hope that it will be rejected when conferees from the House and the Senate finalize a budget bill in September.

George Leventhal, an official at the Association of American Universities (AAU), which represents the 50 leading research universities, says that they hope to get support from defence contractors for the basic research programme.

University representatives deny that the DoD basic research account has received what the subcommittee describes as “never-ending budget growth”, pointing out that it has fallen steadily from $1.4 billion in 1993 to $1.1 billion this year.

Taking a longer perspective, however, the Pentagon has held its spending power in basic research at a level of around $1.1 billion since 1990, during which time its much larger expenditure on research, development, test and evaluation (RDT & E) has slipped in value by one-quarter.

During that period, the Pentagon's procurement of new equipment has nose-dived, alarming defence hawks in the Congress. In the 1980s, procurement usually exceeded RDT & E by a factor of thrree to one. This year, the two items are close to parity — $36 billion for RDT & E and $44 billion for procurement of equipment (see diagram).

The Clinton administration had supported a substantial increase in basic research spending this year, arguing that long-term research is a cost-effective way of ensuring the nation's military strength. The Senate appears to accept this, but the House may not.

In a barbed comment aimed at research spending, the language in the House bill complains of cuts in “defense medical programmes, training and readiness accounts, and other programmes such as munitions which have direct and immediate relevance to war-fighting needs”.

Universities will try to meet members of Congress, including Bill Young (Republican, Florida), chair of the House appropriations subcommittee, during the recess. They will argue that substantial issues are at stake not just for the universities but for national security, and that the amount of money saved is small compared with procurement and other defence needs.

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Figure 1