Cornell Cooperative Extension Community Horticulture

Although a spending proposal in Congress would ax all earmarked projects for the remainder of this year, the plan unveiled this week would actually preserve for universities almost all of the $185-million set aside in last year’s appropriations for agricultural-research earmarks. That and other details about the proposal, including its effect on National Institutes of Health grants and earmarks in other agencies, emerged on Tuesday.

As for the NIH, the plan’s call for a 2-percent increase, to $28.9-billion, would help the agency expand the number of research-project grants awarded this year by nearly 10 percent, to roughly 10,000. That would reverse a decline in recent years.

Over all, higher-education officials were jubilant about the proposal, House Joint Resolution 20, unveiled by Congress’s Democratic leadership on Monday (The Chronicle, January 30). The measure would increase spending for Pell Grants and scientific research for the rest of the 2007 fiscal year, which ends September 30. The House of Representatives is expected to approve the bill in a vote today and the Senate to do so in February.

But higher-education leaders were also bracing for the effect of the earmark moratorium. To pay for other priorities, appropriations-committee leaders raided some of the money set aside in 2006 for earmarks, the controversial, noncompetitive awards directed by members of Congress to universities and other constituents.

In the case of agricultural research, though, what the plan would take with one hand, it would give with the other.

The Democrats would remove $185-million in earmarks in the Department of Agriculture’s Cooperative State Research, Education, and Extension Service. But, following sustained lobbying by land-grant universities, the appropriations committees agreed to keep that money within that agency in 2007, but to shift it to other, nonearmarked accounts. Over all, the service’s budget would get no increase over 2006.

Most of the redistributed money would go to the service’s Hatch Act program, which distributes funds to land-grant institutions according to a population-based formula. The Hatch program’s budget would nearly double, to $322.6-million. Some of the shifted money, $9-million, would go to increasing to $190-million the budget for the National Research Initiative, the service’s principal program of competitively awarded research grants.

However, some land-grant universities will be winners under this plan, while others will lose, said Ian L. Maw, vice president for food, agriculture and natural resources at the National Association of State Universities and Land-Grant Colleges. The losers will include institutions that got more money through earmarks in 2006 than from other department programs like the Hatch Act funds, he said.

“I think that it will be a tough row to hoe, but some of them will finds ways in their own budgets and using state money to keep these projects going” in 2007, he said.

Trackback this Post | Feed on comments to this Post