Committee chair wants more funding for energy research

Eddie Bernice Johnson, chair of the House science committee, has proposed a bill that would substantially increase the budget of the United States’ energy R&D agency.

The bill, formally proposed on 30 July, would increase the budget of the Advanced Research Projects Agency-Energy, a Department of Energy branch that focuses on high-risk, high-potential projects. The agency’s 2019 budget was $366 million; the bill introduced by Johnson would raise this to $428m in 2020, increasing to $1 billion in 2024.

In a statement, Johnson praised Arpa-E’s “impressive track record”, saying that its projects had attracted $2.9bn in private follow-on funding since it was founded in 2009. She added that it was able to fund only about 1 per cent of the proposals submitted to its open funding opportunities and 12 per cent of those submitted to its focused programmes.