FY08 Defense appropriations summary, and a chart

Peter Harsha and the team at the CRA’s Policy Blog have a great summary of the 2008 Defense approps bill that just passed last week. And there’s a chart: check it out.

On Tuesday (Nov. 13th), the President signed the FY 2008 Defense Appropriations conference report, making that bill the first of the twelve FY 08 appropriations bills necessary to fund the continued operation of government to grind its way through to passage (it’s now P.L. 110-116). The Defense bill includes just over $77 billion in funding for Defense Research, Development, Testing and Evaluation (RDT&E), an increase of 2.0 percent over FY 07 and 2.9 percent above the President’s requested level for FY 08. Included within that RDT&E account are pretty substantial increases over the President’s request for basic and applied research efforts in some areas of interest to the computing community — and more modest growth in others. At the same time, overall funding for the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), will see a decline in FY 08 vs both the President’s request and the FY 07 level.

And one more bit about the parts that didn’t seem to do well

Two accounts that don’t seem to fare particularly well in the bill are DARPA IT accounts — the Defense-wide Information and Communications Technology program (which will see a decline of 1.3 percent, about $3 million, vs. FY 07) and Cognitive Computing (which will see a decline of about 2.7 percent, or $4.9 million) in FY 08.