Science in the Triangle

Increases in federal funding for research and development in the past 10 years - from the doubling of biomedical research dollars to the stimulus money - have created jobs and supported the economy in R&D hot spots like North Carolina’s Research Triangle area.

Kei Koizumi

But concerns about the rising U.S. deficit now threaten to slow the flow of federal R&D funding to universities, research institutes and companies developing new technologies. Budget proposals for the fiscal year starting October 2011 are due Monday and the Obama administration has asked all federal agencies to cut funding requests by 5 percent.

The five months of budget negotiations that are ahead will determine whether R&D funding can be protected from the cuts, Kei Koizumi, assistant director for federal R&D in the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy, told faculty at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill Wednesday.

Regardless of the outcome of the negotiations, Koizumi said, “it’s going to be a very tough year.”

With the same amount of money or less to go around, more new research projects might languish for lack of funding and existing projects might have to be scaled back in favor of others with a higher priority.

Health, clean energy, global climate change and security remain among the R&D priorities of the Obama administration, Koizumi said. But the budget may also include some new funding ideas, such as experimental approaches to bring new technologies to market and a shift in how to balance research that is relevant today and high risk-high return research that could prove transformational in the long term.

Results of these policy discussions and budget negotiations will reverberate in R&D hot spots, where federal R&D funding supports a significant part of the local economy.

U.S. industry, nonprofits and taxpayers invest about $400 billion every year in R&D.

The federal government’s share is about 37 percent, or $147 billion. That’s up about 50 percent since 2000 thanks to initiatives to boost biomedical research and advances in clean energy and engineering.

Meanwhile, R&D spending in the Research Triangle about doubled.

In 2008, Duke University, UNC-CH, N.C. State University and RTI International, a research institute in Research Triangle Park, spent about $2.34 billion on R&D, according to a survey by the National Science Foundation and RTI’s annual report.

North Carolina was also among the states that benefited the most from stimulus money earmarked for R&D in the past 18 months - the three universities and RTI were awarded more than $225 million just from the National Institutes of Health.

Hundreds of R&D jobs have been created in the Triangle backed by stimulus funds and university researchers are already asking what will happen with these jobs once the funding runs out.

“There’s not going to be another stimulus,” Koizumi said. “There is some adjustment coming.”

Find Koizumi’s slide presentation here.