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FY20 Budget Brings Increases for NIH, Select Statistical Agencies

1 April 2020 1,468 views No Comment
Steve Pierson, ASA Director of Science Policy

    The FY20 federal budgets were finalized in December, yielding the fifth consecutive year of multi-billion-dollar increases for the National Institutes of Health (NIH). The US Census Bureau budget was also increased to $7.6 billion to complete the decennial census. Among the other highlights, as seen in Table 1, the National Science Foundation (NSF) received a $200 million (2.5 percent) increase, the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) received a $13 million (2.1 percent) increase, and two federal statistical agencies received increases of many percent.

    Table 1: FY16–FY20 Budgets and FY21 Requests

    The FY21 budget request has the administration’s usual cuts for the NIH, NSF, and Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality (AHRQ), but also increases for the Bureau of Economic Analysis (BEA), BLS, and National Center for Education Statistics (NCES). The budget for the Census Bureau, one of the three economic statistical agencies along with BEA and BLS, is ramped back down, but its economic statistics accounts receive a modest increase as part of the administration’s emphasis on economic statistics. President Donald Trump’s FY21 budget also proposes to double the funding for research and development for artificial intelligence and quantum information science over two years.

    The FY21 request has two impactful requests for the federal statistical agencies. In the Department of Education (ED), the administration proposes the transfer of the NCES’s assessment responsibilities—which has a $151 million budget in FY20—to a new center and the transfer of the appointment of the commissioner from the president to the director of the ED Institute of Education Sciences. The new center creates additional bureaucracy that could undermine the current efficiencies and benefits of having the array of statistical studies housed together and integrated. The removal of presidential appointment of the NCES commissioner runs counter to the ASA’s efforts to have Senate confirmation of the commissioner, removed in 2012, restored to strengthen NCES’s ability to provide objective and credible statistical data.

    Figure 1: The budgets of the seven mid-sized statistical agencies normalized to their FY09 levels, along with the GDP deflator to account for inflation. Budget restructuring for ERS in FY15 and ORES in FY19 are accounted for in the graph to allow for comparison over this time period. One-time moving costs in FY16 for BEA are omitted.

    Figure 1: The budgets of the seven mid-sized statistical agencies normalized to their FY09 levels, along with the GDP deflator to account for inflation. Budget restructuring for ERS in FY15 and ORES in FY19 are accounted for in the graph to allow for comparison over this time period. One-time moving costs in FY16 for BEA are omitted.

    For the fourth straight year, the USDA proposes to cut the Economic Research Service (ERS) budget, this time by 27 percent. As justification, The White House states they seek “to eliminate low priority research that is duplicative of research at land-grant universities … while still supporting ERS’s core mission to develop the statistics needed to measure economic concepts in a dynamic farm and agricultural sector.” They specify the Census of Agriculture and Agricultural Resource Management Survey as high-priority statistical reports. The specific proposed cuts for ERS are $11 million to research on agricultural markets and trade, farms, conservation, and agricultural research and development; $8 million to research and analysis on food assistance, nutrition, and diet quality; $2 million to rural prosperity and well-being research and analysis; and $2 million to food safety research and analysis. Congress has rejected these cuts in past years and is likely to do so again.

    The administration’s congressional justification does affirm the ERS headquarters remains in Washington, DC, with 78 positions. The remaining 251 ERS positions are in Kansas City, Missouri, following last year’s move, though an estimated 200 are in the early stages of being filled.

    Excluding the Census Bureau, which has large swings for the decennial census, the median percentage requested for the federal statistical agencies trends up from -2.7 percent in FY18 to 0.8 percent for FY21, as seen in Table 3.

    Agency budgets in FY2009 Dollars

    The requested increases for BEA and BLS are shown in Table 1. For the Census Bureau, the general economic statistics accounts see a requested increase of $4.3 million to $79.0 million that will be used for work with the BEA. In addition to the requested $645 million for BLS shown in Table 1, there is an additional $13 million requested to support the move of the BLS from Washington, DC, to the Census Bureau facilities in Suitland, Maryland. While the requested BLS increase is positive, if it were to be fully funded by Congress, BLS would still be down $50 million in purchasing power since FY09, as seen in Table 3.

    The requested increase of 12% for NCES is mostly a $28 million increase for NCES’s assessment line to address, in large part, the rising cost of developing and implementing digital-based assessments.

    Figure 2: The budgets of five larger statistical agencies normalized to their FY09 levels, along with the GDP deflator to account for inflation. Census is omitted because of the large changes in the decennial census cycle. Budget restructuring for NASS and NCHS in FY15 is accounted for in the graph to allow for comparison over this time period.

    Figure 2: The budgets of five larger statistical agencies normalized to their FY09 levels, along with the GDP deflator to account for inflation. Census is omitted because of the large changes in the decennial census cycle. Budget restructuring for NASS and NCHS in FY15 is accounted for in the graph to allow for comparison over this time period.

    Turning to the finalized FY20 budgets, NIH again saw a sizable increase. For the more modest budgets of the federal statistical agencies, the Office of Research, Evaluation, and Statistics (ORES) in the Social Security Administration saw a 10 percent increase in FY20 over its FY19 level and the BEA saw a 7 percent increase. As seen in Figure 1, the increases mean each agency has the same or more purchasing power than they had in FY09. The BEA increase is to be used to harmonize the national, state, and industry release of gross domestic product data, develop and begin reporting on income growth indicators by 2020, and continue its work on the Outdoor Recreation Satellite Account.

    The $13 million increase for the BLS—accompanied by $27 million in multi-year funding for the physical move of BLS to Suitland, Maryland—is to be used for an annual supplement to the Current Population Survey for the digital economy and work on a new National Longitudinal Survey of Youth cohort.

    Figure 2: The budgets of five larger statistical agencies normalized to their FY09 levels, along with the GDP deflator to account for inflation. Census is omitted because of the large changes in the decennial census cycle. Budget restructuring for NASS and NCHS in FY15 is accounted for in the graph to allow for comparison over this time period.

    Figure 2: The budgets of five larger statistical agencies normalized to their FY09 levels, along with the GDP deflator to account for inflation. Census is omitted because of the large changes in the decennial census cycle. Budget restructuring for NASS and NCHS in FY15 is accounted for in the graph to allow for comparison over this time period.

    As noted in previous years, funding for the federal statistical agencies has been anemic, as seen in figures 1 and 2, where nine of the 12 (non-Census) statistical agencies have lost purchasing power due to inflation since FY09. This trend is also seen in Table 3, where the budgets are shown in FY09 dollars. For six of the agencies, the loss of purchasing power is greater than 10 percent. As a result, many of these agencies are struggling to track emerging trends and take advantage of methodological and technological advances that would help them improve data and reduce respondent burden.

    The FY21 budget request also takes several steps to implement the Foundations for Evidence-Based Policymaking Act and Federal Data Strategy, as Data Coalition Executive Director Nick Hart writes in “President’s 2021 Budget Includes Positive Signals for Data and Evidence Priorities.”

    To follow the FY21 budget developments, see “FY21 NIH, NSF, and AHRQ Budget Developments” and “FY21 Statistical Agency Budget Developments” and follow @ASA_SciPol on Twitter. Also, join the Count on Stats LinkedIn group, where you can network with fellow supporters of the federal statistical agencies, share your observations and perspective, and receive relevant updates.

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