What the FY2027 request buys
Verbatim from the R-2A exhibit for project WP-01 of PE 0602024E. 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.
- Demonstrate model-driven, rational design of biological candidates and increase strength and selectivity of metal/mineral interactions. - Evaluate top biological metal/mineral processing candidates under real-world processing workflows and conditions. - Perform process durability assessments. - Refine the list of candidate biological targets. - Produce a high purity metal/mineral product from a real-world feedstock. - Produce a high purity metal/mineral product from a traditionally uneconomical waste feedstock. - Demonstrate potential for technological scale-up using real world feedstocks. - Initiate a techno-economic analysis to validate the commercial viability and industrial potential of the technology. - Assess the potential for adapting the developed bioprocessing platforms to process other metals and minerals of strategic importance to national security.
The FY 2027 increase reflects a shift from proof-of-concept demonstrations and model development to engineering biologics for industrial processing of real-world feedstocks at scale.
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.
- Identify candidate biological targets that demonstrate highly selective metal interactions or properties that may be engineered to induce highly selective metal interactions. - Baseline the ability of biological candidates to successfully produce a metal or mineral product from simulated feedstocks. - Explore model-driven workflows for rapid design-build-test cycles of biological candidates.
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) |
|---|---|---|
| FY2026 | Enacted | 6.3 |
| FY2027 | Request | 33.6 |
This activity is 23% of project WP-01's FY2027 request and 9.2% of PE 0602024E'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.
12 activities in project WP-01
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 project page.