Funding Uncertainties Continue but Partnership Opportunities Emerge
April 8, 2013
Congress has finally agreed to funding levels for Fiscal Year 2013. The bad news is Congress also allowed sequestration to take effect. Congress passed a continuing resolution for FY 2013 that, for the most part, funds education, workforce and related programs at the FY 2012 spending levels, minus the five percent cut due to sequestration, and an additional across-the-board cut of 0.2 percent. Federal agencies have been given 30 days to submit a plan on how they will implement the sequestration cut. The agencies will have to take into consideration whether programs have continuation awards; both continuation awards and new grants; or only new grants. Then they will have to make difficult decisions: for example, do they protect continuation awards, do they reduce the number of new grants; or do they reduce the amount of each grant. Each agency could decide things differently, including for programs within the same agency.
The House of Representatives and the Senate have also passed FY 2014 budget resolutions. These budget resolutions differ significantly. While both the House and Senate budget resolutions call for deficit reduction, they accomplish it in very different ways. The House budget resolution calls for additional cuts in federal spending while the Senate budget resolution maintains the discretionary spending caps adopted as part of the Budget Control Act (BCA), while the House budget resolution calls for a reduction in these caps related to non-defense discretionary spending.
Both the House and Senate budget resolutions provide reconciliation instructions to committees. The House resolution calls on eight committees, including the Education and the Workforce Committee, to each pass legislation that produces $1 billion in savings over the next 10 years (for a total of $8 billion). In contrast, the Senate resolution only provides reconciliation instructions for the Senate Finance Committee, calling on that committee to pass legislation producing $975 billion in new revenue over the next 10 years. Though budget resolutions are not signed into law, both houses of Congress do have to come to an agreement for this to be binding on the Congress. However, the significant differences between the two measures may make this difficult.
Despite the continued FY 2013 and FY 2014 funding uncertainties, there is potentially positive news to report. Last month, the Executive Office of the President sent a memorandum to the heads of executive departments and agencies about increasing public, industry and scientific community access to the results of federally funded scientific research. The memo directs departments and agencies with over $100 million in annual research and development expenditures to have "clear and coordinated policies for increasing such access."
Each plan must include, in part, a strategy for improving the public's ability to locate and access digital data resulting from federally funded scientific research; and an approach for optimizing search, archival, and dissemination features that encourages innovation in accessibility and interoperability, while ensuring long-term stewardship of the results of federally funded research.
Stations are uniquely positioned to help departments and agencies with this new directive. Given the ability and expertise of stations to reach a broad audience, they could make excellent partners with those looking to increase awareness of federally funded research. In fact, stations have already demonstrated their success in this arena. The best example of this is seen through the National Science Foundation's Connecting Researchers and Public Audiences (CRPA) grants. This was part of the former Informal Science Education program (now Advancing Informal STEM Learning). Here, station grantees have partnered with researchers and scientists to broadcast their findings to a larger audience.
The Grant Center is currently in conversation with federal agencies on your behalf, educating them on the value of public broadcasting partnerships. We will keep you up to date as more concrete plans for specific grant programs develop. In the meantime, stations should contact departments and agencies while they continue to develop their implementation plans to let them know that they could be valuable partners in this endeavor.
To stay up to date about how each federal agency is being impacted by sequestration, continue to check this Grant Center page.
