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National Defense > Blog > Posts > House Budget Would All but Kill Off DHS Research Efforts

11/17/2011

House Budget Would All but Kill Off DHS Research Efforts
The budget being proposed by the House for the Department of Homeland Security’s Science and Technology Directorate is so bare bones it would essentially terminate most of the research and development in the department, the head of the division said Nov. 17.

“It is basically a decision not to have an S&T directorate,” Tara O’Toole, undersecretary of the division said of the proposed House cuts.

There is a point where DHS would no longer have a credible science and technology directorate, O’Toole testified before the House Homeland Security Subcommittee’s cybersecurity, infrastructure protection and security technology subcommittee.
 
The $398 million the House budget proposes for fiscal year 2012 would be a record low investment in R&D. Of that amount, more than half must be spent to maintain laboratories, and on other mandatory overhead. That leaves $106 million for discretionary R&D, amounting to an 80 percent cut over the last fiscal year, O’Toole said.

Half of the $106 million would be needed to pay for existing commitments and to shut down projects it could no longer afford.

“This would be a very dire set of circumstances for DHS,” she said.

The directorate would be left with $45 million to support all R&D investments, which would only fund Transportation Security Administration projects, she said. Cybersecurity, chemical-biological, border security, cargo security and first responder research would “all go away.”

“There would be no money for any of that,” she added.

The Senate’s proposed $657 million budget would leave it as a viable R&D organization, “but barely,” she said. At that level, the directorate could only focus on four priority areas: transportation security, biological, cybersecurity and first responder needs, but nothing else, she testified.

DHS is the only department that carries out research and development for first-responder technologies, she added.

In order to achieve a critical mass and make achievements, R&D funding cannot be spread thinly like “peanut butter” over several categories, she said. 

The new National Bio and Agro-Defense Facility in Manhattan, Kan., would be eliminated in both chambers’ bills, she noted. It would leave the nation without a high-containment laboratory capable of handling contagious foreign animal diseases.

Small Business Innovation Research grants would shrink from 60 to four, she said. Many of the companies that rely on those grants would go out of business, she added.
  
Posted at 11:58 AM by Stew Magnuson | Permalink | Email this Post | Comments (1)

Comments

Re: House Budget Would All but Kill Off DHS Research Efforts

O'Toole's arguments are great ... up until the last paragraph. 

If companies are relying on SBIR grants to stay in business, they should NOT be in business. 

DHS should fund promising innovative research. 

DHS should NOT be in the business of propping up research companies that would otherwise fail.   Let the scientists at these companies go to other hungry small business competitors and do the research there.
Rich Arnold at 11/22/2011 8:00 AM

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