Colleges Fear Research Cuts by Pentagon

Major universities in California are girding for what they call an educational calamity if current efforts in Congress succeed in slashing the Pentagon’s budget for academic research contracts by 50% nationwide.

The cutbacks, already approved by the full House, will be considered next week by the Senate Appropriations Committee--triggering an intense lobbying campaign by California institutions and the California congressional delegation.

Even if the Senate does not concur with the severity of the House cuts, a compromise would probably still result in serious cutbacks in university research, congressional sources said.

The House Appropriations Committee initiated the effort out of growing concern that the readiness of combat forces has eroded too far, while academic research has gone unscathed. Moreover, critics charge that much of the research is wasteful.

California schools, a major recipient of the contracts, collectively stand to lose half of their annual defense research funding, which totaled $236 million in fiscal 1993. The cutbacks would particularly hurt USC, UCLA, Stanford University and UC San Diego, though virtually every state and private campus would be affected.

The engineering school at UCLA gets more than half of its research contracts from the Pentagon, amounting to about $18.7 million annually. Loss of contracts would curtail stipends for graduate and postgraduate students, as well as reduce spending for new laboratory equipment.

Ultimately, the cuts would damage the school’s ability to conduct basic scientific research, affecting what it considers one of its central educational missions, said Kumar Patel, UCLA vice chancellor for research. “It is a disaster,” Patel said.

Pentagon officials have joined forces with Patel and others, arguing that the cuts would rob the military of its future technology leadership while doing little to solve the defense budget problem.

“This reduction in defense research would have very dire results,” Anita Jones, the Pentagon’s director of defense research and engineering, said in an interview. “You will not see them immediately, but over the long term they would be severe.”

In fiscal 1993, the Pentagon issued $1.9 billion in research contracts to about 580 universities nationwide, providing the largest block of federal support for basic university research in most engineering, physical sciences and computer sciences disciplines. The House cuts would pare about $950 million of that.

By contrast, universities get most of their medical, biological and other life sciences research funded through a variety of non-defense agencies, which are not subject to significant cutbacks this year.

Jones said the defense-sponsored research has yielded such important results as the atomic clocks for the global positioning satellite system that is rapidly moving into the consumer economy. Pentagon sponsorship also led to the creation of the Internet, the computer network that is fast becoming a key building block of the information superhighway.

The cutbacks also demonstrate the continuing vulnerability of California and its key institutions to the federal defense budget, which has continued to drop since 1986, but is still far from bottoming out.

Until this year, university research funding by the Pentagon had gone unscathed and in fact had shown some modest increases. Because it is not appropriated as a lump sum, but rather as part of many other budgets, Congress had not focused on it until this year.

Rep. John Murtha (D-Pa.), the powerful chairman of the House Appropriations Committee, has grown increasingly worried that military preparedness is becoming weak and therefore spending not directly related to military forces must be sacrificed.

The case for continued high university research was also hurt by disclosures in recent years of extravagant spending at taxpayer expense for such faculty perks as expensive meals, big liquor bills and even a yacht at Stanford.

Rep. Julian C. Dixon (D-Los Angeles), a member of the Appropriations Committee, said that after years of cutbacks affecting every other sector of the military, it was time for universities “to take their fair share” as well.

Dixon said that if the Senate does not go along with the House position, the cuts might be reduced in severity, though not eliminated, in a later conference committee.

“I understand the universities are screaming . . . but there have been extra cuts in our military readiness, and research has gone unscathed,” Dixon said.

Dixon denied that Murtha’s motivation for the cuts was as a retaliation against Rep. George E. Brown Jr. (D-Colton), chairman of the House Space, Science and Technology Committee, who has led a fight against Murtha’s support of alleged pork barrel projects at universities.

Indeed, Loren Thompson, an expert on defense procurement issues, said the cutbacks are justified because military forces have been cut far deeper than overall defense budgets. Congress, he said, has been reluctant to cut overhead and frills even as the number of aircraft, ships and tanks has rapidly dropped.

“The support costs of our defense Establishment are killing our ability to maintain a fighting force,” Thompson said. “This creates a bureaucratic structure like a worm: all tail and no teeth.”

But for strapped educational institutions, the proposed cuts would come at an inopportune time, university officials say. USC received about $50 million in research contracts from the Pentagon last year, the most of any campus in the state.

Caltech received $16 million in defense research contracts last year, representing 10% of the school’s entire research budget, a spokesman said. Most of the impact would fall at Caltech’s engineering school. The same problem affects Stanford, which received $42 million last year.

Among other University of California schools, Berkeley received $16.6 million in fiscal 1993, Irvine $5.6 million, Santa Barbara $15.8 million and San Diego $46 million. The California State University system received $16 million.

Dire predictions have prompted lobbying efforts to head off the cutbacks next week in the Senate.

Sen. Barbara Boxer (D-Calif.), among other members of the delegation, has asked Sen. Daniel Inouye (D-Hawaii), chairman of the Senate Appropriations Committee, not to follow Murtha’s lead on research funding.

Boxer argued that the cuts “would seriously undermine the research base that is critical to so many aspects of our national security.”

Also, California Assembly members wrote a letter to Murtha protesting the cuts, as did a large number of university officials from around the country. Congressional sources said it is too early to say what Inouye will do.