Bringing Transparency to Federal R&D Infrastructure Costs
There is an urgent need to manage the escalating costs of federal R&D infrastructure and the increasing risk that failing facilities pose to the scientific missions of the federal research enterprise. Many of the laboratories and research support facilities operating under the federal research umbrella are near or beyond their life expectancy, creating significant safety hazards for federal workers and local communities. Unfortunately, the nature of the federal budget process forces agencies into a position where the actual cost of operations are not transparent in agency budget requests to OMB before becoming further obscured to appropriators, leading to potential appropriations disasters (including an approximately 60% cut to National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) facilities in 2024 after the agency’s challenges became newsworthy). Providing both Congress and OMB with a complete accounting of the actual costs of agency facilities may break the gamification of budget requests and help the government prioritize infrastructure investments.
Challenge and Opportunity
Recent reports by the National Research Council and the National Science and Technology Council, including the congressionally-mandated Quadrennial Science and Technology Review have highlighted the dire state of federal facilities. Maintenance backlogs have ballooned in recent years, forcing some agencies to shut down research activities in strategic R&D domains including Antarctic research and standards development. At NIST, facilities outages due to failing steam pipes, electricity, and black mold have led to outages reducing research productivity from 10-40 percent. NASA and NIST have both reported their maintenance backlogs have increased to exceed 3 billion dollars. The Department of Defense forecasts that bringing their buildings up to modern standards would cost approximately 7 billion “putting the military at risk of losing its technological superiority.” The shutdown of many Antarctic science operations and collapse of the Arecibo Observatory have been placed in stark contrast with the People’s Republic of China opening rival and more capable facilities in both research domains. In the late 2010s, Senate staffers were often forced to call national laboratories, directly, to ask them what it would actually cost for the country to fully fund a particular large science activity.
This memo does not suggest that the government should continue to fund old or outdated facilities; merely that there is a significant opportunity for appropriators to understand the actual cost of our legacy research and development ecosystem, initially ramped up during the Cold War. Agencies should be able to provide a straight answer to Congress about what it would cost to operate their inventory of facilities. Likewise, Congress should be able to decide which facilities should be kept open, where placing a facility on life support is acceptable, and which facilities should be shut down. The cost of maintaining facilities should also be transparent to the Office of Management and Budget so examiners can help the President make prudent decisions about the direction of the federal budget.
The National Science and Technology Council’s mandated research and development infrastructure report to Congress is a poor delivery vehicle. As coauthors of the 2024 research infrastructure report, we can attest to the pressure that exists within the White House to provide a positive narrative about the current state of play as well as OMB’s reluctance to suggest additional funding is needed to maintain our inventory of facilities outside the budget process. It would be much easier for agencies who already have a sense of what it costs to maintain their operations to provide that information directly to appropriators (as opposed to a sanitized White House report to an authorizing committee that may or may not have jurisdiction over all the agencies covered in the report)–assuming that there is even an Assistant Director for Research Infrastructure serving in OSTP to complete the America COMPETES mandate. Current government employees suggest that the Trump Administration intends to discontinue the Research and Development Infrastructure Subcommittee.
Agencies may be concerned that providing such cost transparency to Congress could result in greater micromanagement over which facilities receive which investments. Given the relevance of these facilities to their localities (including both economic benefits and environmental and safety concerns) and the role that legacy facilities can play in training new generations of scientists, this is a matter that deserves public debate. In our experience, the wider range of factors considered by appropriation staff are relevant to investment decisions. Further, accountability for macro-level budget decisions should ultimately fall on decisionmakers who choose whether or not to prioritize investments in both our scientific leadership and the health and safety of the federal workforce and nearby communities. Facilities managers who are forced to make agonizing choices in extremely resource-constrained environments currently bear most of that burden.
Plan of Action
Recommendation 1: Appropriations committees should require from agencies annual reports on the actual cost of completed facilities modernization, operations, and maintenance, including utility distribution systems.
Transparency is the only way that Congress and OMB can get a grip on the actual cost of running our legacy research infrastructure. This should be done by annual reporting to the relevant appropriators the actual cost of facilities operations and maintenance. Other costs that should be accounted for include obligations to international facilities (such as ITER) and facilities and collections that are paid for by grants (such as scientific collections which support the bioeconomy). Transparent accounting of facilities costs against what an administration chooses to prioritize in the annual President’s Budget Request may help foster meaningful dialogue between agencies, examiners, and appropriations staff.
The reports from agencies should describe the work done in each building and impact of disruption. Using the NIST as an example, the Radiation Physics Building (still without the funding to complete its renovation) is crucial to national security and the medical community. If it were to go down (or away), every medical device in the United States that uses radiation would be decertified within 6 months, creating a significant single point of failure that cannot be quickly mitigated. The identification of such functions may also enable identification of duplicate efforts across agencies.
The costs of utility systems should be included because of the broad impacts that supporting infrastructure failures can have on facility operations. At NIST’s headquarters campus in Maryland, the entire underground utility distribution system is beyond its designed lifespan and suffering nonstop issues. Its steam distribution system will be at complete end of life (per forensic testing of failed pipes and components) in less than a decade and potentially as soon as 2030. If work doesn’t start within the next year (by early 2026), it is likely the system could go down. This would result in a complete loss of heat and temperature control on the campus; particularly concerning given the sensitivity of modern experiments and calibrations to changes in heat and humidity. Less than a decade ago, NASA was forced to delay the launch of a satellite after NIST’s steam system was down for a few weeks and calibrations required for the satellite couldn’t be completed.
Given the varying business models for infrastructure around the Federal government, standardization of accounting and costs may be too great a lift–particularly for agencies that own and operate their own facilities (government owned, government operated, or GOGOs) compared with federally funded research and development centers (FFRDCs) operated by companies and universities (government owned, contractor operated, or GOCOs).
These reports should privilege modernization efforts, which according to former federal facilities managers should help account for 80-90 percent of facility revitalization, while also delivering new capabilities that help our national labs maintain (and often re-establish) their world-leading status. It would also serve as a potential facilities inventory, allowing appropriators the ability to de-conflict investments as necessary.
It would be far easier for agencies to simply provide an itemized list of each of their facilities, current maintenance backlog, and projected costs for the next fiscal year to both Congress and OMB at the time of annual budget submission to OMB. This should include the total cost of operating facilities, projected maintenance costs, any costs needed to bring a federal facility up to relevant safety and environmental codes (many are not). In order to foster public trust, these reports should include an assessment of systems that are particularly at risk of failure, the risk to the agency’s operations, and their impact on surrounding communities, federal workers, and organizations that use those laboratories. Fatalities and incidents that affect local communities, particularly in laboratories intended to improve public safety, are not an acceptable cost of doing business. These reports should be made public (except for those details necessary to preserve classified activities).
Recommendation 2: Congress should revisit the idea of a special building fund from the General Services Administration (GSA) from which agencies can draw loans for revitalization.
During the first Trump Administration, Congress considered the establishment of a special building fund from the GSA from which agencies could draw loans at very low interest (covering the staff time of GSA officials managing the program). This could allow agencies the ability to address urgent or emergency needs that happen out of the regular appropriations cycle. This approach has already been validated by the Government Accountability Office for certain facilities, who found that “Access to full, upfront funding for large federal capital projects—whether acquisition, construction, or renovation—could save time and money.” Major international scientific organizations that operate large facilities, including CERN (the European Organization for Nuclear Research), have similar ability to take loans to pay for repairs, maintenance, or budget shortfalls that helps them maintain financial stability and reduce the risk of escalating costs as a result of deferred maintenance.
Up-front funding for major projects enabled by access to GSA loans can also reduce expenditures in the long run. In the current budget environment, it is not uncommon for the cost of major investments to double due to inflation and doing the projects piecemeal. In 2010, NIST proposed a renovation of its facilities in Boulder with an expected cost of $76 million. The project, which is still not completed today, is now estimated to cost more than $450 million due to a phased approach unsupported by appropriations. Productivity losses as a result of delayed construction (or a need to wait for appropriations) may have compounding effects on industry that may depend on access to certain capabilities and harm American competitiveness, as described in the previous recommendation.
Conclusion
As the 2024 RDI Report points out “Being a science superpower carries the burden of supporting and maintaining the advanced underlying infrastructure that supports the research and development enterprise.” Without a transparent accounting of costs it is impossible for Congress to make prudent decisions about the future of that enterprise. Requiring agencies to provide complete information to both Congress and OMB at the beginning of each year’s budget process likely provides the best chance of allowing us to address this challenge.
Using the NIST as an example, the Radiation Physics Building (still without the funding to complete its renovation) is crucial to national security and the medical community. If it were to go down (or away), every medical device in the United States that uses radiation would be decertified within 6 months, creating a significant single point of failure that cannot be quickly mitigated.
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