FPN24-25

U.S. FY 2025 Budget Progress

May 20, 2024

The House Appropriations Committee is meeting Thursday May 23 to approve its plans to propose a 6% cut to non-defense spending and a 1% increase to defense spending for fiscal year 2025. Committee Chair Tom Cole (R-OK) announced the toplines last week as well as preliminary budget allocations for the panel's 12 subcommittees that together draft the federal discretionary budget. He also released the committee's schedule for advancing the spending bills. The subcommittee that funds NASA, the National Science Foundation, and the Commerce Department plans to advance its spending proposals on June 12, and the subcommittee for the Department of Energy plans to advance its proposals on June 28. Reacting to the allocations, Democrats on the committee stated they will not support anything less than a 1% increase to non-defense spending.

Meanwhile, leaders of various science agencies will testify this week on their budget request for fiscal year 2025. The heads of NASA and the National Science Foundation will appear together on Thursday before the Senate Appropriations Committee, which will also hear from leaders of the Department of Energy on Wednesday and the National Institutes of Health on Thursday. The head of the National Institute of Standards and Technology will appear before the House Science Committee on Wednesday, following a hearing last week focused on NSF. At that event, the former chair of NSF's board, Dan Reed, testified that a 6% cut to NSF would be "devastating" to the agency, coming on the heels of the 8% cut it received for the current fiscal year.