What the FY2027 request buys
Verbatim from the R-2A exhibit for project 615094 of PE 0601103F. This is the budget justification's own description of work that has not happened yet — the one thing no other level of the budget carries.
- Continue funding competitive research grants at U.S. universities that focus on significantly expanding the basic knowledge of Department of the Air Force-relevant science and technology areas. - Continue to focus on complex research efforts not normally achievable in smaller funded, single investigator awards. - Continue to support and recognize superior academic researchers in the early stages of their careers through the Presidential Early Career Award for Scientists and Engineers program. - Continue funding the existing multi-year, multidisciplinary awards and receive proposals from universities to fund next round of multidisciplinary research grants.
FY 2027 decreased compared to FY 2026 by $12.889 million due to decreased emphasis on multidisciplinary university research initiatives. This reduction reflects programmatic adjustments to the DAF Science and Technology portfolio for strategic realignment to optimize core research areas and improve resource efficiency. This will result in approximately 8 fewer new multidisciplinary university research grants awarded in this effort.
FY2026: the year under way
Prior-year accomplishments and current-year plans from the same exhibit. Context for the FY2027 plan, not a series — an activity partitions its project exactly in the request year, but can under-cover it in earlier years.
- Fund competitive research grants at U.S. universities that focus on significantly expanding the basic knowledge of Department of the Air Force-relevant science and technology areas. - Focus on complex research efforts not normally achievable in smaller funded, single investigator awards. - Support and recognize superior academic researchers in the early stages of their careers through the Presidential Early Career Award for Scientists and Engineers program. - Fund the existing multi-year, multidisciplinary awards and receive proposals from universities to fund next round of multidisciplinary research grants.
Three years, and no five-year plan
An R-2A activity publishes the prior year, the current year and the budget year. The FYDP outyears exist at project and program-element level and are deliberately absent here rather than inferred. Estimate types are colored and never summed into one figure.
| Fiscal Year | Estimate Type | Amount ($M) |
|---|---|---|
| FY2025 | Actual | 68.3 |
| FY2026 | Enacted | 64.5 |
| FY2027 | Request | 51.6 |
This activity is 56% of project 615094's FY2027 request and 56% of PE 0601103F's. In the request year the activities under a project sum to it exactly; in the current year they under-cover it in about 9% of cases, so an activity's delta can legitimately exceed its parent's and the two must not be compared row to row.
3 activities in project 615094
Every R-2A line of this project, largest FY2027 request first. Linked where the activity has enough of its own narrative to carry a page; the rest are shown in full on the program-element page.