by Ronda Britt[1]

Research and development expenditures at the nation's 39 federally funded R&D centers (FFRDCs) rose from $15.2 billion in FY 2009 to $16.8 billion[2] in FY 2010, according to data from the National Science Foundation (NSF) FFRDC Research and Development Survey. Over $1 billion of the FY 2010 total was supplied by funds from the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 (ARRA) (table 1). This 10.6% increase is the largest one-year increase since 2002, when expenditures increased 14.5% to $11.5 billion. Between FY 2002 and 2009, FFRDC expenditures increased an average of 5% each year, with the exception of a brief stall in FY 2006 (figure 1).

  Table 1 Source Data: Excel file

  Figure 1 Source Data: Excel file

FFRDCs are privately operated R&D organizations that are exclusively or substantially financed by the federal government.[3] FFRDCs provide the sponsoring federal agencies with capabilities to meet special long-term R&D needs that cannot be met as effectively by existing in-house or by contractor resources. Each FFRDC is operated, managed, and/or administered by a university or university consortium, a nonprofit organization, or an industrial firm, either as an autonomous organization or as a separate operating unit.[4]

Federal funding accounted for 97.3% ($16.4 billion) of the FFRDC's total expenditures in FY 2010. Since 2001 the federal government has consistently provided over 96% of the funding to the FFRDCs each year, and the FFRDCs' federally funded R&D expenditures have increased 69%, from $9.7 billion in FY 2001 to $16.4 billion in FY 2010.

The laboratories, centers, and institutes that are designated as FFRDCs conduct work within a variety of fields, such as physics, engineering, astronomy, computer science, and psychology. Similar to the proportions in previous years, in FY 2010 basic research activities accounted for 39% of total FFRDC R&D expenditures; applied research, 31%; and development, 30%.

Five FFRDCs reported ARRA-funded expenditures of over $100 million in FY 2010: the Jet Propulsion Laboratory ($101 million), Pacific Northwest National Laboratory ($113 million), Oak Ridge National Laboratory ($135 million), Los Alamos National Laboratory ($139 million), and the National Cancer Institute at Frederick ($183 million) (table 2). ARRA provided the funding for nearly 30% of the National Cancer Institute's total R&D expenditures in FY 2010 and was responsible for 50% ($48 million) of the FY 2010 R&D expenditures at the Thomas Jefferson National Accelerator Facility.

  Table 2 Source Data: Excel file

Data Sources and Limitations

The statistics on FFRDC R&D presented in this report come from the FY 2010 NSF FFRDC R&D Survey. This annual survey is completed by FFRDC administrators and collects data from the FFRDCs on R&D expenditures by source of funds (federal, state and local, business, nonprofit organizations, or other), character of work (basic research, applied research, or development), and type of cost (salaries, software, equipment, subcontracts, or indirect costs). This survey has been a census of the full population of FFRDCs since FY 2001.

The survey was redesigned for FY 2010 to update the sources of funding categories and to include three additional questions. A separate source of funding category was added for "Nonprofit organizations," the seldom used category of "Institutional funds" was deleted, and the "Industry" category was renamed "Business" to be comparable with other National Center for Science and Engineering Statistics (NCSES) surveys. The three new questions asked for the total R&D expenditures funded by ARRA, R&D expenditures by type of cost, and the total operating budget of the FFRDC. Finally, the instructions were revised to explicitly include clinical trial expenditures as well as research training grants in the definition of R&D.

The full set of detailed tables from this survey will be available in the report FFRDC Research and Development Expenditures: Fiscal Year 2010 at http://www.nsf.gov/statistics/ffrdc/. Individual detailed tables from the FY 2010 survey may be available in advance of publication of the full report. For further information, please contact the author.

Notes

[1]  Ronda Britt, Research and Development Statistics Program, National Center for Science and Engineering Statistics, National Science Foundation, 4201 Wilson Boulevard, Suite 965, Arlington, VA 22230 (rbritt@nsf.gov; 703-292-7765).

[2]  R&D expenditures presented in this report are in current dollars.

[3]  Several FFRDCs are prohibited from accepting nonfederal R&D funding.

[4]  For a description of the federal guidelines and definitions governing FFRDCs, see the "General Notes" section of the NSF's Master Government List of FFRDCs at http://www.nsf.gov/statistics/ffrdclist/gennotes.cfm. The Master Government List of FFRDCs is accessible at http://www.nsf.gov/statistics/ffrdclist/.