Some measurement problems are known to exist in the Federal Funds of R&D data. Some agencies cannot report the full costs of R&D, the final performer of R&D, or R&D plant data.
For example, the DOD does not include headquarters costs of planning and administering R&D programs, which are estimated at a fraction of 1% of its total cost. DOD has stated that identification of amounts at this level is impracticable.
The National Institutes of Health (NIH) in the Department of Health and Human Services currently has many of its awards in its financial system without any field of R&D code. Therefore, NIH uses an alternate source to estimate its research dollars by field of R&D. NIH uses scientific class codes (based upon history of grant, content of the title, and the name of the awarding institute or center) as an approximation for field of R&D.
The National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) does not include any field of R&D codes in its financial database. Consequently, NASA must estimate what percentage of the agency’s research dollars are allocated into the fields of R&D.
Also, agencies are required to report the ultimate performer of R&D. However, through past workshops, NCSES has learned that some agencies do not always track their R&D dollars to the ultimate performer of R&D. This leads to some degree of misclassification of performers of R&D, but NCSES has not determined the extent of the errors in performer misclassification by the reporting agencies.
As of volume 71, all respondents are required to report R&D obligations by state and performer. Previously, this information was reported by 11 agencies (i.e., the Departments of Agriculture, Commerce, Defense, Energy, Health and Human Services, Homeland Security, the Interior, and Transportation; the Environmental Protection Agency; NASA; and NSF). Obligations of these 11 agencies represent the majority of total federal R&D obligations (98% for FYs 2008–20). There is some underreporting by state, which may affect states unevenly. For example, geographic distribution of DOD development funding to businesses (formerly industry) reflects the location of prime contractors and not the numerous subcontractors who perform much of the R&D. DOD development funding to businesses represented 32.0% of total federal obligations for development in FY 2021 ($33.3 billion of $103.9 billion).
R&D plant data are underreported to some extent because of the difficulty some agencies, particularly DOD and NASA, encounter in identifying and reporting these data. DOD’s respondents report obligations for R&D plant funded under the agency’s appropriation for construction, but they are able to identify only a small portion of the R&D plant support that is within R&D contracts funded from DOD’s appropriation for RDT&E. Similarly, NASA respondents cannot separately identify the portions of industrial R&D contracts that apply to R&D plant because these data are subsumed in the R&D data covering industrial performance. NASA R&D plant data for other performing sectors are reported separately.
