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Much-Awaited Omnibus Spending Bill Finally Released

 

Nearly three months into the new fiscal year and after months of seemingly little-to-no negotiations,

Congressional leaders released the much-awaited FY2023 omnibus appropriations package late yesterday.  Coming in at more than 4,100 pages, it contains all 12 spending bills for FY2023.  The current short-term government funding measure expires at midnight Saturday and Congressional leaders are working to get the new measure passed before then.

The Office of Federal Relations is in the process of digging through the package and details will emerge throughout the process.  We will share new information contained in the bill along the way.  In the meantime, we wanted to highlight a few of the initial highlights from the bill below:

  • The Pell Grant maximum would increase by $500 and the new maximum would increase to $7,395 for the next academic year.
  • NIH would be funded at $47.5 billion, an increase of $2.5 billion.
  • ARPA-H would see a total of $1.5 billion, which is also authorized, an increased of $500 M. ARPA-H will be administratively within NIH, but the bill prohibits ARPA-H, including its headquarters, from being physically located on any part of the existing NIH campus, and it requires ARPA-H to have offices or facilities in not less than 3 geographic areas. Further, in determining the location of these offices or facilities, the director is required to make “fair and open consideration” of the characteristics of the intended location and the extent to which the location will facilitate the advancement of the goals and functions of the agency.
  • NSF would be funded at $9.87 billion for FY2023, with the appropriators acknowledging that expectations were set for the agency by the CHIPS and Science Act, passed earlier this year.
    • Of the funds allocated to NSF, approximately $7.8 M would be for the Research and Related Activities Account while $1.37 billion would be for the Education and Human Resources Account.
  • Within NASA, which would be funded at $25.4 billion, $7.8 billion would go to Science. Space Grant would be funded at $58 million.
  • NOAA Oceanic and Atmospheric Research would be funded at $661.3 million, which would include funding of $104 million for the cooperative institutes.
  • Base Sea Grant would be funded at $80 million while Sea Grant Aquaculture would see a funding level of $14 million.

With respect to a provision that applies to a host of programs across different departments and agencies, the bill would wave “PAYGO” rules, which would implement mandatory sequester cuts to various programs, for FY2023 and FY2024.

As we said above, we will continue to dig through the legislation and the accompanying reports.  Both are available on the Senate Appropriations Committee webpage here.


 

“CHIPS Plus” Bill Passed by Senate

By a vote of 64 to 33, the Senate adopted this afternoon the “CHIPS Plus” legislation.  While much of the press attention has been focused on the provisions related to semiconductor chips in the 1,000-plus page bill, most of the legislation is focused on the broader scientific research enterprise.  Although the legislation addresses, among other agencies, the Department of Energy, NASA, and the National Institutes of Standards and Technology, the language on the National Science Foundation has been of the most interest to a significant portion of the academic community.

For example, the bill would authorize a new Technology, Innovation, and Partnership Directorate at the NSF, which would be charged with emphasizing applied research and commercialization.  Another set of provisions would greatly expand the scope of the ESPCOR program and require NSF, to the great extent practicable, to allocate 20 percent of all NSF research and education funds to institutions in EPSCOR states by FY2029; the bill calls for the set-asides to start at 15.5 percent starting in FY2023.  In the most recent year, about 13-14 percent of all funds went to such institutions.  

A section-by-section of the summary is available here.

The proponents of the legislation hope that the House will take it up before recessing for August this Friday.

House Passes Omnibus, FY22 Chart Now Available

Yesterday the House passed an omnibus appropriations package for FY22, following negotiations between House and Senate appropriators. The final package includes modest increases for key scientific and higher education accounts. The Senate is expected to vote on the package quickly to send it to the President’s desk. Current government funding is set to expire on Friday, so another short continuing resolution will be necessary to allow the Senate to clear procedural steps.

A chart tracking key accounts relevant to UW is available here. Our office will post detailed updates as information becomes available. We will also discuss appropriations in more detail during our town hall on March 24th at noon PT (register here).