How does federal R&D relate to other government objectives and priorities?
Most of the federal government’s R&D is mission oriented; that is, it is intended to serve the goals and objectives of the agency that provides the funds (e.g., agricultural research in the Department of Agriculture). The only exception to this is NSF, whose mission is to support basic and applied research, research facilities, and education across a wide range of science and engineering disciplines. The relative priority of different areas of R&D has varied over the years, reflecting changing national priorities and the role of R&D within them. Spending on defense R&D has exceeded all other R&D spending (grouped together as “nondefense R&D”) for most of the past four decades, although the relative size of the two sectors has varied considerably over the years. Figure 1 shows how priorities in nondefense R&D have shifted over the same period. Civilian R&D expenditures reached a high point in the mid-1960s, declining for several years thereafter. After several years of significant growt
