The Advanced Research Projects Agency-Energy (ARPA-E) and the Science To Achieve Results (STAR) programs were created in order to promote energy research at the earliest stages by giving out grants to those searching for more efficient and greener energy technologies. The Trump administration, along with new EPA secretary Scott Pruitt, have been trying to starve the environmental agency by cutting its budget into oblivion. In order to present this brand of dark magic to the world, Republicans argue that government is bureaucracy and bureaucracy is inefficient. Of course, this “fact” is based solely on people’s memories of the worst experiences they’ve had with underfunded and overworked government programs that are mostly underfunded by … Republicans.
In its official FY18 budget, released Tuesday, the Trump administration proposed the termination of the Advanced Research Projects Agency-Energy (ARPA-E), a bipartisan initiative that funds research into cutting-edge energy technology. The decision to eliminate ARPA-E was “in line with administration policies,” according to the budget request.
Clean energy research took another major hit with the administration’s proposal to reduce the budget of the Department of Energy’s Office of Energy Efficiency and Renewable Energy (EERE) to $636 million, about $1.4 billion, or 70 percent, below the FY16 enacted level for the office.
Arstechnica is reporting on two research programs that say that this is not the case. At all. These programs are important and working as advertised. In the case of the ARPA-E, Republicans’ assertions that the products they fund aren’t going to show a return are false.
But the NAS study discredits the notion that ARPA-E is poorly managed and has failed its mission because the research it funds isn’t marketable. It points out that ARPA-E’s mission is to kickstart early-stage research and technologies. “Most ARPA-E awards last for about three years, much shorter than the decades required to commercialize energy technologies,” the NAS paper notes. The agency itself has only been around for six years, and in such a short time there’s little data to show how the research has impacted the energy sector. However, the study says, there's plenty of data on "intermediate impacts" that ARPA-E has had on the energy field.
On top of that the study points out that the programs have shown a lot of success as is and to “reform” this program would be to make it worse, not better. It’s as simple as that. The STAR program has had its funding frozen since the Trump administration was able to get its grift in order; but that too is a successful program that is important and doing all of the things it is supposed to do.
According to the NAS study, the STAR fellowships were supposed to be consolidated under the National Science Foundation (NSF), but the study says that the fellowships lost under the STAR program have not been regained at NSF. “It appears that the move to centralize graduate fellowships in NSF has led to a large reduction in the support of students interested in environmental research. In 2015, there were 168 NSF fellows in environmental sciences and ecologic research and 51 STAR fellows. In 2017, after the STAR fellowship program was canceled, there were 176 NSF fellows in environmental sciences and ecologic research; thus, there are indeed fewer fellowships in environmental and environmental health sciences.”
NAS wrote that this fellowship program was the US government’s primary vehicle for funding environment and health research, which, over 20 years, “has supported interventions that may reduce the cost of regulations, protect public health, and save lives.”
Saving lives is for pansies, y’all. Pruitt and his crew are working a multi-pronged attack that replaces experts in the field of climate change with oil industry goons, and rolls back environmental regulations that were put into place to protect things like drinking water for children. Cutting the budgets on research that might help us get out from under our fossil fuel dependence is at best short-sighted greed.