In recent years, U.S. strategies and policies have advanced greatly in addressing biological risks from all sources. We at CSR have marked several areas of progress through writings and analysis: the beginning of a pivot toward pathogen-agnostic approaches, requiring annual exercises on biological risks, and the creation of the Biodefense Council within the Department of Defense, and more. 

Improved policies are a necessary first step, yet they must be followed by sufficient resources and a serious commitment to implementation.  

In September, CSR launched a scorecard process to track signs of implementation of stronger U.S. biodefense and biosecurity policies. CSR’s Biodefense Budget Breakdown will accompany the scorecard, tracking trends in resources and investments. 

Before the launch of this tool, no publicly-accessible resource provided a detailed analysis of the total budget across the federal biodefense enterprise. By creating the Biodefense Budget Breakdown, we hope to provide a robust and user-friendly resource for the government, key stakeholders, and the general public. 

This tool is intended to provide focused analyses of the biodefense budget, with multiple interfaces to understand and analyze the federal biodefense portfolio. This tool starts with the cumulative U.S. biodefense totals for each fiscal year dating back to 2019, progresses to agency-specific drill-downs, and culminates with a detailed line item index for biodefense budgets across key agencies. This tool reports biodefense investments across three steps in the budget cycle: requested (R), enacted (E), and actual (A) levels of funding.

To learn more about the methodology and decisions behind this project, see our launch post.

Data last updated: June 12, 2024.

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Our breakdown starts with the actual dollars spent in Fiscal Year 2019 (FY19), when the total biodefense spending across the United States government in that year was $20.283 billion. For comparison, the actual dollars spent in the most recent fiscal cycle, FY23, totaled $27.727 billion. Though this is a steady increase during that timeframe, within the five-year window from FY19 to FY23 no enacted budget has experienced a year-to-year increase greater than $5 billion. 

At the time of release of the FY25 Presidential Budget Request, the government was operating under the FY24 Continuing Resolution and had not yet passed the full slate of FY24 appropriations bills. As a result, this tracker does not include the details of the FY24 enacted (E) budget.

The current FY25 Presidential Budget Request totals $52.407 billion, a slight decrease from the FY24 request of $53.323 billion. One interesting comparison for the request for FY25 is to  actual dollars spent in FY23, the last period for which those figures are available: this was an increase of nearly $24 billion. Looking across the various budgets and years also illuminates what could change regarding FY25: based on previous budget negotiations, we anticipate Congress will make significant cuts to the bills that get approved and submitted to the President for signature. For comparison, the FY23 Presidential Budget Request was for a total of $102 billion for biodefense programs, but the omnibus bill enacted by Congress at the end of 2022 cut $74 billion from this total, leaving the FY23 biodefense total of $27.727 billion.

Using our selection criteria and the publicly available budget justification documents issued by each department, CSR has documented and categorized biodefense budget requests and spending across 10 federal agencies. The Department of Defense (DoD) and the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) represent a vast majority of the total biodefense budget, as warranted by their roles and responsibilities as assigned within the National Biodefense Strategy.

The next two dashboards are dedicated to the DoD and HHS biodefense budgets, providing drill-down analysis by:

• department subunits (e.g. ASPR, CDC, FDA)
• spending categorizations
• indexes of each line item’s funds 

Visualizations within the analysis can be toggled using the toggles on the right of the dashboard, with additional filter functions built into the data sets enabled by scrolling the cursor. 

The final dashboards provide detailed analysis across the total biodefense enterprise, with the ability to select each agency’s budget for drill-down analysis and the complete index of the Federal Biodefense Footprint. To download the data set, please use the built-in download function located in the bottom right corner of the Tableau dashboard. 

A systematically planned and well-resourced biodefense budget is critical to providing the capabilities necessary for addressing the modern biological threat landscape. Our team’s goal is for the Biodefense Budget Breakdown to become a hub for sustained analysis and engagement on the biodefense budget. By providing these data visualizations and resources, we hope this tool enables more efficient and effective discussions for those involved in the formulation, justification, appropriation, and implementation of US investments in addressing biological threats. 

Check back regularly for CSR’s continued analysis of the US biodefense budget, and our updates to the data following each annual Presidential Budget Request cycle, final Congressional appropriations, and other major relevant events. The data and level of detail provided are largely dependent on what is provided in the justification books and budget details published by US federal agencies. As such, we recognize that there are limitations to this database. Therefore, we encourage feedback and engagement to provide the best tool possible. Please follow this page and CSR communications for further analysis and engagement from our staff, and refer to our launch post for additional information on the methodology and decisions behind the visualizations.

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Update Note

This first update includes some adjustments to prior funding cycles (FY19–FY24) where the CSR team has added previously-missing data, or has decided to include additional programs that we previously deemed to fall outside the biodefense investment categories laid out in our methods, based on what we have learned about them. These adjustments reflect our continual effort to provide the most accurate representation of federal biodefense investments from the publicly available budget justifications. The largest update is from prior budget cycles at HHS, which include immunization programs, with minor updates across prior funding cycles for DoD, DHS, State, and USDA. For any questions or concerns regarding this update, please contact our team using the link below.

Listed below are the projects that CSR added in the current update to the prior cycles (FY19–FY24):

• HHS: Immunization and Other Respiratory Diseases, Public Health Data Modernization Initiative, Vaccines for Adults, Vaccines for Children, Response Ready Enterprise Data Integration

• DHS: Mobile Detection Deployment Program

• State: Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty (NPT) and Biological Weapons Convention Cooperation

• USDA: Office of Homeland Security

For DoD, we also eliminated what we believe were duplications in tracked spending, based on how the department was conveying its counting within operations and maintenance project funding lines.

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