Introducing CSR’s New Biodefense Budget Breakdown

Contents

Introduction

Since its founding, the Council on Strategic Risks (CSR) has prioritized analyzing, addressing, and anticipating biological threats as a national security imperative. Recognizing the rapid acceleration of capabilities across the life sciences and biotechnology sector, the increasing rate of infectious disease outbreaks caused by drivers like climate change, and the risks posed by any actors who seek to develop biological weapons, the Nolan Center on Strategic Weapons has dedicated significant time and resources to advance achievable risk-reducing solutions in our biodefense efforts.

A key component to enable the pursuit of risk-reducing solutions is sufficient funding. Thus, conducting yearly analysis of the President’s Budget Request has been a routine component of our efforts to assess how the U.S. government is progressing in expanding its capabilities and capacity to deter deliberate biological threats, as well as rapidly identify, respond to, and mitigate natural and accidental biological threats. Policy decisions are pointing the nation in a far improved direction, yet this must be followed by resources and a serious commitment to implementation. We hope to contribute to these efforts—and to share data in an open, comprehensible manner—by creating a public resource with our past tracking and most recent analysis of the 2024 Fiscal Year (FY) President’s Budget Request. The Nolan Center is calling this effort the Biodefense Budget Breakdown.

The Biodefense Budget Breakdown, maintained by the Nolan Center, is a resource dedicated to providing transparency into total biodefense investments within the U.S. federal budget. One of the most important goals of this tool is to contextualize trends in biodefense expenditures by providing multiple years of budgetary history and the ability to drill down into layers of data. As such, the data tracks back to the FY19 budget (actual funds spent) and up through the current President’s Budget Request for FY24.

In recent years, key strategy documents and policy publications indicate the priority levels needed for a robust national biodefense enterprise. Within National Security Memorandum 15, the President requested that the Director of the Office of Management and Budget analyze the annual budget to ensure that it adequately resources the objectives detailed in the National Biodefense Strategy’s Implementation Plan.

We believe that the Biodefense Budget Breakdown will provide individuals across the executive and legislative branches with a critical resource to aid in the budget justification process, help fulfill the promise of the improvements made to U.S. policies in recent years, and serve as a publicly-available tool to help the public understand how the federal government is doing in establishing and enabling programs needed to adequately address the biological threat landscape.

Access the project and data

Methodology

Data Collection

To make this tool as accurate and detailed as possible, the data included is sourced directly from the budget justification books produced by the respective U.S. government agencies following the release of the annual President’s Budget Request.

The budget justification books detail line-item funds across three steps in the budget cycle: requested (R), enacted (E), and actual (A) levels of funding. This breakdown shows any differences (therefore highlighting decision-making) across each step; and helps to account for where things stand at any given time. Data is reported in millions (M), as United States dollars (US$), and in current-year dollars (i.e., the funds at that time; we did not retroactively adjust previous FY numbers to reflect inflation or compare funds over time to today’s monetary values today).

CSR analyzed project funding lines for their potential role in biodefense activities and support, and used this as the basis for what is included within this project’s data. When provided, CSR included project descriptions from the justification books. To be included within our database, expenditures must meet one of the below biodefense criteria, which are largely defined in the National Biodefense Strategy and Implementation Plan as core biodefense elements (and this is the source of the definitions in quotations below). For each line item we included in our data, CSR experts assigned one of the following categories as the leading role of that investment:

Admin/Policy: Expenditures that are assigned to or associated with the administrative capabilities and policy implementation activities in support of the National Biodefense Strategy and other relevant biodefense strategy directives.
Agricultural Security: Expenditures that enhance U.S. ability to protect food crops and livestock from naturally emerging, deliberate, and accidental biological threats. Enhancing the safety of agricultural practices and improving disease surveillance on farms, including to ensure food security and to prevent zoonotic spillover into human populations.
CBRN Defense: Bucketed categorization for spending activities that include biodefense investments as part of a larger spending activity targeted at chemical, biological, radiological, and nuclear (CBRN) preparedness and response.
Domestic Health Capacity: Expenditures that “enhance U.S. ability to respond swiftly to biological incidents by modernizing and expanding the footprint of domestic health infrastructure and by restoring public trust in health, science, and medicine, in part by countering misinformation and disinformation.”
Early Warning: Expenditures that “develop the ability to rapidly detect, characterize, report, forecast, and share relevant information (including genetic sequence data), as appropriate, on pathogens that pose a biological threat of national or international significance soon after they emerge in humans, animals, and plants. Early warning will inform and enable (a) early assessment and identification of the origin of biological incidents and (b) effective decision-making and interventions at local, national, and international levels.”
Enabling Research: Activities that provide critical research, development, and testing to advance biodefense capabilities, readiness, and technology. Does not include mature technologies ready for procurement and use.
Global Health Security: Expenditures that “advance the development, enhancement, and maintenance of effective global health security capacities through sustained political, financial, and technical support, leveraging catalytic U.S. leadership and support, including in support of the multilateral Global Health Security Agenda”.
MCMs: Medical countermeasures, including diagnostics, therapeutics, and vaccines; as well as personal protective equipment (PPE). National biodefense strategic goals include:
- “Rapidly make and equitably deploy safe and effective vaccines against any pathogen family, at timescales and quantities necessary to contain and control a potential nationally or internationally significant biological incident.”
- “Establish innovative and agile domestic therapeutic research, development, manufacturing, and delivery capabilities that yield a range of safe and effective therapeutics, available before or readily created during a nationally or internationally significant biological incident.
- Develop, validate, manufacture, authorize, and deploy widely available, affordable, and highly sensitive and both specific and broadly reactive tests domestically for biological hazards assayed from any human-, animal-, agriculturally-, or environmentally derived specimen, at timescales and sensitivities necessary to respond, contain, and control a potential nationally or internationally significant biological incident.
- Establish resilient and scalable supply and manufacturing capabilities for PPE in the United States that can: (a) enable a containment response for; (b) meet U.S. peak projected demand for healthcare and other essential critical infrastructure workers during a nationally or internationally significant biological incident, and (c) protect warfighters from biological threats.
Prevention: Activities that “prevent nationally or internationally significant biological incidents by (a) minimizing the chances of laboratory accidents; (b) reducing the likelihood of deliberate use or accidental misuse; (c) ensuring effective biosafety and biosecurity practices and oversight; (d) promoting responsible research and innovation; and (e) reducing the likelihood of animal to human spillover of zoonotic pathogens.”
Public Health: Bucketed categorization for spending activities that include investments that are targeting bolstered public health preparedness and response.

References

Listed below are the corresponding landing pages to the U.S. federal agency justification books used for our data collection.

Scope & Limitations

To provide accurate and reproducible analysis, CSR deliberately limited data collection to publicly-available documents. If a Department’s public budget justification to Congress did not include project line items that met the biodefense categorization requirements described above, CSR did not include them within this database.

Our data analysis required casting a wide net to properly capture deliberate, natural, and accidental biological threats. In doing so, the limiting factor is the level of detail provided within the project descriptions or cross-referenced with the budget-in-brief. While not designed as a public health tracker, public health and One Health approaches are significant elements of biodefense strategies and we aimed to include the most relevant ones within the database.

Within the justification books, some line items cover a range of objectives, and do not solely focus on biodefense. For example, some programs and technologies are designed to cover both biological and chemical threats, and federal budget information does not always disaggregate between them. In some cases, disaggregation is not possible, such as in efforts focused on delivering fieldable decision aids that can be utilized across the countering weapons of mass destruction threat space. As a result, some of the line items that CSR has included are only partially dedicated to biodefense, with the remaining percentage going toward all-hazards or other related efforts as detailed in project descriptions. Because several objectives are often combined into a single line item, the exact percentage of these line items that is spent on biodefense is unknown.

When possible, we excluded from the database budget categories that were exclusively dealing with chemical weapons threats or non-biodefense activities. This included funding exclusively addressing threats from chemical warfare agents (CWAs), pharmaceutical-based agents (PBAs), nerve agents, and non-traditional agents (NTAs); however, we note the general personnel and programmatic overlap that exists across defined budgetary line items.

Conclusion

The Biodefense Budget Breakdown was created to serve as a tool to benefit the public—in particular, we hope that others can now leverage the budget tracking that CSR has long done privately to save time and add value to their work. We also hope that it provides high utility to government personnel tasked with duties regarding biodefense and the annual budget, insight and analysis to showcase success, accurate evidence to account for where progress needs to accelerate, and a clearer picture of the biodefense budget.

CSR will continue to provide additional analysis using the Biodefense Budget Breakdown and engage with key stakeholders to continue advancing our biodefense priorities. With each budget cycle, CSR hopes to add clarity and insight into biodefense budget trends, and requested and enacted appropriations. In doing so, we look forward to engaging with the community of practice and hearing feedback to improve this tool and our analysis.

Acknowledgments

The U.S. federal budget cycle is a wide-ranging effort that involves many individuals across the federal government. Without the efforts of those within the Executive Office of the President, each agency partner, and other government personnel who contribute to the detailed justification books, we would not have been able to conduct this analysis.

This tool is the culmination of years of internal documentation and vision by numerous Nolan Center staff, detailed on the project page. We thank them as well as previous visiting fellows, including Arushi Gupta, Rhys Dubin, and Skandan Ananthasekar for their contributions to this work. We also would like to recognize other key subject matter experts who provided initial feedback that helped shape and strengthen this project, especially Christine Farquharson and Norman Kahn.