Sponsors (5)
The bill locks in multi-year, growing federal research funding to boost science, innovation, and job creation, but does so in a way that reduces fiscal constraints and risks higher deficits and automatic budget growth that may outpace oversight.
Researchers, scientists, universities, and national labs receive stable, multi-year increases in federal R&D funding across NSF, DOE Office of Science, DOD S&T, NIST, and NASA from FY2026–FY2035, improving resources for basic and applied research.
Research institutions and government contractors gain planning and hiring certainty from multi-year authorizations and automatic CPI‑U indexing (beginning FY2036), enabling longer-term projects and workforce commitments.
Increased federal R&D investment can spur innovation and commercialization, supporting high-tech job creation and economic opportunities for small businesses and middle-class families.
Higher federal R&D spending raises the deficit or requires budget offsets, which could lead to higher taxes or cuts to other programs affecting taxpayers.
Exempting these appropriations from sequestration and PAYGO weakens automatic fiscal constraints and reduces transparency about the budgetary impact of the increases.
Automatic CPI‑U indexing can lock in rising nominal budgets over time that may outpace program performance incentives and congressional oversight, reducing flexibility to reallocate funds based on results.
Based on analysis of 2 sections of legislative text.
Authorizes and specifies rising annual appropriations for NSF, DOE Office of Science, DOD S&T, and NIST for FY2026–FY2035, with CPI‑U indexing starting in FY2036.
Official title: Prioritize funding for an expanded and sustained national investment in basic science research.
Introduced April 3, 2025 by Richard Joseph Durbin · Last progress April 3, 2025
Provides multi-year mandatory funding authorizations and appropriations for major federal research agencies. It sets fixed dollar appropriation levels for the National Science Foundation (NSF), Department of Energy Office of Science, Department of Defense science and technology programs, and the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) for fiscal years 2026–2035, and creates a CPI‑U based automatic inflation adjustment for those accounts beginning in FY2036. The bill is a multi-year research funding vehicle that increases federal research budgets on a fixed schedule, then ties future year growth to the Bureau of Labor Statistics Consumer Price Index for All Urban Consumers (CPI‑U) beginning in FY2036.