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Investment by angel groups declined at least ten percent this year, according to the Angel Capital Association's (ACA) annual survey of angel group leaders. In January and February, about 55 percent of these leaders predicted that both their number of deals and total invested dollars would increase in 2008. Half of them now admit that their predictions for the year were overly optimistic.

The University of Texas System Board of Regents recently approved $15 million in funding for three programs that will support innovation and extraordinary effort among its faculty. Two of these programs will make awards for teaching excellence, one for faculty at the University of Texas at Austin (UT Austin) and the other for teaching at the system's other eight universities.

The Scottish Government announced last month a funding plan for the university system that directs more than 10 percent of current funding into a new Horizon Fund created to make targeted investments in research, technology transfer, and entrepreneurial development.

In the "TBED People and Organizations" column of the Dec. 10 Digest, Oklahoma Gov.

When one looks beyond the first few pages of many sections of the agencies’ fiscal year 2008 budget request summaries, the mental concept of a television rerun appears. As SSTI staff pored through the budget this week, several found ourselves saying, “Didn’t we read the same thing last year?”

In fiscal year 2008, President Bush proposes $11.42 billion total to support the American Competitiveness Initiative (ACI) across the National Science Foundation (NSF), Department of Energy’s Office of Science (DOE SC), and the Department of Commerce’s National Institute of Standards and Technology laboratories (NIST).

In this year’s State of the Union Address, President Bush announced that his FY 2008 budget request would contain funding to support research to eliminate the projected growth of automobile carbon dioxide emission within 10 years.

The Administration request of $89 billion for the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) budget is predicated on passage of the Administration’s version of the 2007 Farm Bill proposals. As designed, the Administration's 2007 farm bill proposals would spend approximately $10 billion less than the 2002 farm bill spent over the past five years, according to the USDA press release.

The Administration's FY 2008 discretionary budget request for the Department of Commerce (DOC) is $6.55 billion, a decrease in discretionary spending of $76 million from the FY06 appropriation. The department’s full-time equivalent staff would increase by 4,700 people between FY06 and FY08.

 

Funding for every DOC program or office supporting state and local TBED and traditional economic development programs would be cut deeply or proposed for elimination.

 

The Administration’s FY 2008 budget request for the Department of Defense (DoD) totals $481.4 billion, an 11.3 percent increase over FY07. [Note: DoD’s FY07 appropriations bill was one of only two passed before the current fiscal year began. As a result, SSTI is able to provide comparisons between the FY08 request and the FY07 appropriations. Variance between FY08 request and FY07 appropriations is provided in parentheses.]

 

According to the U.S. Department of Education (ED), federal funding represents only 8.9 percent of America’s spending on elementary and secondary education during the 2006-07 school year. That share in FY 2008 would be $56 billion according to the Administration’s budget request for the agency.

The Department of Energy (DOE) budget request for FY 2008 totals $24.3 billion, a 3 percent increase above the FY07 request.

The lion’s share of the $697.3 billion FY 2008 budget request for the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) is allocated towards Medicare (55.4 percent) and Medicaid (29.0 percent) spending.

The Administration’s FY 2008 budget request for the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) totals $46.4 billion in funding, an increase of 8 percent over the FY 2007 request. The key priority of this year’s request is a $13 billion initiative for border security and immigration enforcement. 

 

The Administration's FY 2008 budget request for the Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) is $36.15 billion (31 percent decrease from the FY06 appropriation level – mostly due to a FY06 supplemental one-time funding for disaster relief). The department’s major priority for FY08 will be increasing home ownership.

 

The Administration’s FY 2008 request of $10.705 billion for the Department of the Interior (DOI) represents a decrease of 2.3 percent from the FY06 appropriation. The FY08 figure is 1.7 percent above the president’s FY07 request.

 

In preparation for the National Parks Centennial, the park service will receive the largest budget in its history with $2.1 billion. Indian Affairs, wildfire preparedness, landowner stewardship, rural water, and National Park Service construction bear the majority of the department’s cuts.

 

The Administration's FY 2008 request for the Department of Labor (DOL) is $10.6 billion in discretionary budget authority, a decrease of $900 million (7.83 percent less) compared to the FY06 appropriation level of $11.5 billion. Compared to the FY06 budget overview, the agency’s payroll would increase by 679 full-time equivalent positions, however.

The Administration's FY 2008 budget request for the Department of Transportation (DOT) is $67 billion. This funding would be distributed across the department's five key strategic objectives - improving safety (30.4%), reducing congestion (54.6%), increasing global transportation connectivity (2.1%), protecting the environment (9.8%) and supporting national security (1.4%) - with the balance of 1.7 percent going toward organizational excellence.

 

There are only four programs in the Treasury Department that SSTI monitors for the tech-based economic development community. Most of them are slated for termination or phase-out in FY 2008.

For the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), the Administration has requested $7.2 billion for FY 2008, a 1 percent decrease from the FY07 request. Under the new budget, Science and Technology activities would receive $754.5 million (4.3 percent decrease). Within S&T, research activities would decrease 2.4 percent to $478.5 million.

The Administration’s FY 2008 budget request for NASA totals $17.309 billion (3.9 percent increase from the FY06 appropriation) and is distributed across six directorates and offices.

The Administration’s FY 2008 National Science Foundation (NSF) budget request of $6.43 billion represents an increase of nearly $409 million (6.8 percent) above the FY07 request. The large increase is distributed across many research and related activities:

• Mathematical and Physical Sciences  - $103 million increase
• Engineering - $55 million