The Z Files: A Look Ahead to 2025
As we draw to the year’s end and thoughts typically turn to Christmas and New Year’s holidays, use-or-lose leave, and time with family and friends, there is still a lot of activity as agencies gear up for transition in January. This will be our last Digest and my last column for the calendar year 2024.
As we look ahead into calendar year 2025, several items are of great interest to the tech transfer community. The first item — actually still in 2024 — is the current Continuing Resolution (CR) that ends this week on December 20. It is a bit hard to say where things will end up, but looking at what Speaker Mike Johnson has put forward and the November election results, a CR through as long as March is realistic. It may be shorter, but the 119th Congress will certainly be completing the budget for 2025, and not the current 118th Congress.
The 119th Congress will begin when the new House and Senate are sworn in on January 3. The House is expected to pick up where they left off with the same Speaker, and the House calendar is available here. Meanwhile, Senate leadership will shift from Democrat Chuck Schumer to Republican John Thune, impacting quite a bit in terms of the direction of the Senate. One of the Senate’s first focuses will be serving in its role of “advice and consent” for President Donald Trump’s nominations. This will occupy much of the early months — but as you may have seen in the news, President Trump is far ahead of his last term in making nominations, and the Senate will be controlled by the same party.
We have seen a Trump Administration before, and Lab-to-Market was a Cross-Agency Priority Goal. The fact that it was retained between the Obama Administration and the first Trump Administration is a good sign, and we generally see very bipartisan support for technology transfer. On the day this column is released, the FLC is meeting with a bipartisan group from the Congressional Research and Development (R&D), Inventions, and Science and National Labs caucuses. The R&D Caucus co-chair, Rep. Bill Foster of Illinois, spent over 20 years at Fermi Lab and even had an invention. While the FLC does not lobby, this is a great chance to build bridges and show why federal tech transfer is important.
Circling back to the 2025 budget, the big news is the possibility of cuts — and cuts are expected. It is hard to say where things will go in the world of the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), and its full impact on tech transfer is even less clear, as intramural research has not historically been a major item on the chopping block. For an overview of the federal budget process, you can watch a webinar I hosted on the topic in the FLC learning center. Although the webinar is from 2023, little has changed — we were even in a CR situation then, too. If you want to understand what DOGE is doing, the first part of this webinar lays out the issue.
If you find this interesting or are a bit of a budget wonk like me, the Congressional Research Service keeps a current table of all of the appropriations bills and links to each. This is my go-to source for summary information. For more analysis at a glance, the American Institute of Physics (AIP) Federal Science Budget Tracker offers good comparisons between the President’s requests and House and Senate marks at a summary level.
There are a lot of things swirling around, but there is not much point in worrying — at this point, the parts are not in place to predict what comes next. Above all, we help create economic value and security for the nation, and there is a great deal to love about that!
There is plenty to look forward to in 2025, including the National Meeting in May! Registration is now open, and we look forward to seeing you there!
I wish you all the best and a happy New Year!