The fate of more than $300 million in science-related funds was plunged into uncertainty this week when President Donald Trump declined to approve them, defying the recently passed spending law, according to Republican and Democratic appropriators.
The continuing resolution that Congress passed earlier this month provides for more than $12 billion in emergency-designated funding for a wide range of purposes, which the president is allowed to approve either entirely or not at all.
Yet this week, Trump signed a memorandum approving 16 of those funding provisions and rejecting 11 others. The funds were designated as “emergency” appropriations under a bipartisan agreement that allowed Congress to boost funding for certain programs without surpassing statutory spending caps.
“None of the spending is truly for emergency needs,” Russ Vought, director of the White House Office of Management and Budget, wrote in a memo to Trump on Monday directing him to approve only some of the funds.
Caught up in Trump’s omissions are hundreds of millions of dollars that lawmakers approved last year for the National Science Foundation and NOAA, as the administration works to target those agencies through other funding cuts and staff reductions.
The NSF stands to lose $234 million that would have gone to its equipment and facilities budget, effectively zeroing out that account.
The funds would pay for a computing facility in Texas to support artificial intelligence research, as well as upgrades to American infrastructure in Antarctica and other projects “advancing American innovation, discovery, and security,” according to the office of Senate Appropriations ranking member Patty Murray (D-Wash.).
NOAA would miss out on $100 million already appropriated to its procurement and construction account. The funds would go toward next-generation weather satellites and radar.
Murray and Senate Appropriations Chair Susan Collins (R-Maine) fired off a letter to Vought on Thursday questioning his memo recommending that Trump approve only some of the emergency-designated funds.
They wrote that the language in the spending law “does not, and has never been interpreted to, provide the President the ability to concur in some, but not all, of the emergency designations.”
“Regardless of our views on [recent spending laws and agreements],” Collins and Murray wrote, “it is incumbent on all of us to follow the law as written — not as we would like it to be.”
The White House did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
