In this year’s State of the Union address, President Barack Obama identified examples of research and development (R&D) that directly involve materials research, “I want Americans to win the race for the kinds of discoveries that unleash new jobs—converting sunlight into liquid fuel; creating revolutionary prosthetics….” He said, “Twenty-first century businesses will rely on American science and technology, research and development.”

He backed his statements, the following month, with his budget request that includes $146 billion for R&D overall, an $8 billion or 6% increase from 2015 enacted levels.

Yet, in terms of the budget for materials R&D, Nabil Bassim—who chairs the Government Affairs Committee (GAC) of the Materials Research Society (MRS)—defines the funding climate as flat. “It hasn’t been great in the last few years,” he says.

However, particularly exciting in this year’s proposal for the materials research community is the administration’s emphasis on advanced manufacturing. “The President focuses on manufacturing, which is reflected in the NIST [National Institute of Standards and Technology] budget request,” says Damon Dozier, Director of Government Affairs at MRS. NIST’s budget request includes $150 million to coordinate the National Network for Manufacturing Innovation across multiple federal departments and agencies and to fund two institutes for five years. Most importantly, the budget proposes a $1.93 billion one-time mandatory funding to be used in FY 2017 to FY 2024 to complete the network of up to 45 institutes, “where researchers, companies, and entrepreneurs can come together to develop new manufacturing technologies,” according to the NIST budget proposal.

According to the White House, the 2016 budget proposal calls for a total of $2.4 billion “for Federal R&D directly supporting advanced manufacturing at [the National Science Foundation, the Department of Defense, the Department of Commerce], and other agencies, consistent with the goals and recommendations of the National Strategic Plan for Advanced Manufacturing.” Among the institutes already in the network are the Institute for Advanced Composites Manufacturing Innovation (Department of Energy), Lightweight Innovations for Tomorrow (DOD), Power America (with a focus on wide-bandgap semiconductors, DOE), and America Makes (with a focus on additive manufacturing, DOD).

In other areas with a particular materials research interest, the 2016 budget proposes $12.3 billion for the DOD Science & Technology Program, with $3.0 billion for the US Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA).

The budget provides the DOE Office of Science with over $5.3 billion and NSF with over $7.7 billion. It also provides $755 million for NIST laboratories. The FY 2016 proposal increases total funding for these three key basic research agencies by $0.7 billion over the 2015 level to $13.8 billion.

Another major initiative supported across departments and agencies is the National Nanotechnology Initiative which will hold at the same levels as last year, at $1.54 billion.

Breaking this down into support for materials research, Dozier sees that the DOD request results in an 8.3% decrease for basic research but a 1.4% increase for applied research. Funding for DARPA, he says, would increase by 6.0% in all defense research science programs.

In the DOE Office of Science’s Basic Energy Sciences (BES), funding for the Materials Science and Engineering Division will receive an increase of 3% over FY 2015. Funding for BES, which also manages Scientific User Facilities and the Energy Frontier Research Centers, would increase by 6.7% over last year’s numbers. A total of $325 million is to go to the US Advanced Research Projects Agency-Energy (ARPA-E), which supports high-risk, high-payoff materials research.

To address the administration’s Materials Genome Initiative, the FY 2016 proposal requests $256.95 million for the Cyber-Enabled Materials, Manufacturing, and Smart Systems initiative within NSF. The funding request for the Division of Materials Research is $315.80 million, which is an increase of 2.9% over FY 2015. Funding for 21 Materials Research Science and Engineering Centers would hold steady at $56.0 million.

The MRS GAC has been monitoring the US R&D budget for several years and is particularly concerned about the country’s global competitiveness. According to GAC, over the past decade China has increased its R&D expenditures by 90% and South Korea by 50%, while US expenditures have remained relatively level. GAC correlates this cutback in funding to the “declining rate of discovery, numbers of patents, and workforce preparedness.”

The Committee on Science, Space, and Technology in the House of Representatives is also concerned with US competitiveness as the members began debating in April on how basic R&D should be funded. Just as MRS Bulletin went to press, the Chair of the committee, Lamar Smith (R-Texas), introduced the America COMPETES Reauthorization Act of 2015 to the committee.

Table: Fiscal Year 2016 Budget Request (In millions of US dollars)