Much ink has been spilled about the toll that shutdowns take on public administration, investments and projects, but compared to the now-regular continuing resolution, they’re almost a rare occurrence.
Continuing resolutions hold funding more or less at what was authorized in the previous fiscal year’s budget. This means that funding - and the directions associated with that funding - remain the same. Agencies do have some flexibility in how they respond to the situation, but their budget constraint is firm.
The federal government is heavily involved in research & development, especially in things like the space program or fundamental sciences. Alessandra Zimmermann of the American Association for the Advancement of Science published a report last month examining the impacts of CRs on government investments, particularly from an R&D angle. However, she also provides sublime insights into how funding really gets allocated in such conditions.
To begin with, Zimmermann lays plain our chronic budgetary dysfunction with, of course, the parsimony of a scientist:
In fact, over the last 46 years, there has been an average of 4.3 CRs enacted per year, with only three of those years not requiring a single CR. The government has operated, on average, 180 days of the fiscal year under a CR. If you skip past the extremely full-year-CR-prone 80s, the average over the last 33 years has been 4.7 CRs lasting 124 days. This is not an insignificant amount of time to be operating under financial constraints.
Think about what these numbers imply.
When CRs happen, their effects are not distributed equally. Some agencies, such as the DoD or DHS, take priority, and are exempt or allocated funding sooner.
This results in the Homeland Security and Defense subcommittees spending less than a month under CR on average between 1999 and 2009.2 In terms of R&D funding across the agencies, Defense contains a significant chunk – over half of it. However, other R&D intensive subcommittees like Labor-HHS and Commerce-Justice-Science are the ones that spent the most time under a CR, with 96 and 89 days respectively.
This prioritization makes sense, but nonetheless, the scientific community outside of Pentagon-world feels the burn:
CRs aren’t just keeping the budget flat – they also involve a freeze on any new projects and their associated spending. Newly authorized programs may functionally exist, but under a CR they are not appropriated any funding and thus cannot fund, hire or otherwise staff new initiatives until regular appropriations begins. This can mean delays to funding calls, less time to apply for funding opportunities than predicted or intensifying competition on research grants, or decreases in award sizes as planned increases are pushed back.
The lack of predictability in funding means that:
Research and medical programs have also reported that the funding hills and valleys impact what they buy, with only the bare minimum purchased under a CR and then a mad dash to spend a full year’s appropriation in a couple months. This results in over-purchasing of non-perishables near the end of the fiscal year to use up remaining budget on items that can carry over into the next fiscal year.
Zimmermann continues to explain the wrenches thrown in the administrative gears, echoing a previous post on BP50. The opportunity cost is apparent. As she puts it:
… CRs actively cost money as work hours are dedicated to the management of CR-related tasks instead of core duties.