Appendix B

Analysis of Current Federal Funding for Rural STEM Programs and Research

The committee was tasked with evaluating the quality and quantity of current federal programming and research in preK–12 science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) and workforce development in rural areas. Dan Aladjem from Policy Studies Associates was contracted to conduct this analysis and communicated throughout the process to establish methodology, variable creation, and cross tabulations. The committee developed criteria for determining the quality of identified programs guided by previous work in the Board on Science Education on effective STEM education and guidelines for rigorous education research like those laid out in Scientific Research in Education (National Research Council, 2002) and in the Common Guidelines for Education Research and Development (2013) developed by the U.S. National Science Foundation (NSF) and the Institute for Education Sciences in the U.S. Department of Education. This appendix presents portions of the commissioned paper; the committee’s analysis, interpretation, and use of the information from the following material is in Chapter 3.

APPROACH AND METHODS

The reach of the federal government is broad, so constructing an inventory of federal programs requires certain assumptions and simplifications to identify, inventory, and assess the quality of current federal support for rural preK–12 STEM education and workforce development. The following describes the process used.

Federal programming is defined here as federal assistance as catalogued in the System for Award Management (SAM.gov; General Services

Administration, 2023). The Federal Assistance Listings (AL) are considered “the single, authoritative, governmentwide comprehensive source of Federal financial assistance program information produced by the executive branch.”¹ The AL cover 56 federal agencies, including all cabinet-level agencies. The Office of Management and Budget has aggregated AL data from SAM.gov into the Federal Program Inventory (FPI) to provide a “coherent picture of all Federal programs, and the performance of the Federal Government as well as individual agencies.”² The Office of Management and Budget launched the FPI earlier this year, so there remain inconsistencies in the data and as yet incomplete capabilities. Nonetheless, for the purposes of this analysis, the FPI provides the most valid and comprehensive source of data on federal programs.

This analysis draws on the publicly available data on the FPI website, collected from SAM.gov as of February 2, 2024. Although the FPI includes many types of assistance, this review focuses on formula grant programs and project grant programs. The FPI data for each program include

• AL number
• program title
• agency/subagency
• objective
• URLs to SAM.gov, usaspending.gov, and grants.gov
• assistance type
• beneficiary types
• applicant types
• a categories designation.

NSF programs do not have individual AL numbers. Rather, each directorate has a unique AL number. To better capture the full inventory of federal programs, the committee analyzed datasets provided by NSF. Awards made in fiscal year (FY) 2024 (October 1, 2023, through September 30, 2024) with the word “rural” in either the title or the abstract were examined.³ Importantly, awards were not considered to be related to rural issues merely by being awarded to an institution in a rural area. In addition, the award amount references “Awarded Amount to Date” so solely reflects the award amount for FY 2024. In other words, some grants may have had only part of their funding awarded for FY 2024.

Binary variables for preK–12 education, STEM fields, rural communities, and workforce development were created for the FPI data (described

___________________

¹ Requirement to Provide Public Notice of Federal Financial Assistance Programs, 2 CFR §200.203(a)(1), amended October 2, 2024. https://www.ecfr.gov/current/title-2/section-200.203

² Office of Management and Budget, Federal program inventory, https://fpi.omb.gov/about/about-the-data

³ NSF Awards Advanced Search, https://www.nsf.gov/awardsearch/advancedSearch.jsp

below), which was then analyzed in Excel to create counts of programs in each analytic category (preK–12, STEM, rural, and workforce) and of programs across combinations of categories.

Data on program quality were drawn primarily from program websites, the Federal Register, SAM.gov, and the federal budget. A full analysis of all programs in the FPI was beyond the scope of this paper. A small number of programs at the intersection of preK–12, STEM, and rural were selected for the quality analysis.

Variable Construction

For both datasets, binary variables to code each program as related to preK–12 education, STEM fields, rural communities, and workforce development were created by coding a cell as 1 if the search found one of the terms listed for the variable and 0 if none of the terms were found.

FPI Data

Tables B-1, B-2, and B-3 show the search terms used for each of the variables in the FPI data. The variables chosen below are those that occur in the FPI data. Each was searched in the program title, popular name, agency, subagency, objective, beneficiaries, and categories.

The formula for the rural variable searched for the word rural in the program title, popular name, agency, subagency, objective, beneficiaries, and categories.

Limitations

While this analysis draws on the most valid set of data to inventory federal programs supporting preK–12 STEM education and workforce efforts in rural communities, certain limitations must be considered when assessing its overall contribution.

First, the FPI is a newly launched resource. The Office of Management and Budget (2024) acknowledges its current limitations and has outlined

TABLE B-1 Search Terms Used for PreK–12 Education Variable

SOURCE: Committee generated from commissioned paper.

INVENTORY OF FEDERAL STEM INVESTMENTS

The tables below present the numbers of federal programs in different groupings, from an overall count of programs to counts for each analytic group: preK–12 education, STEM (defined broadly as discussed), rural, and workforce development. The paper reviews the federal government as a whole first, then explores NSF, and finds the following:

• Federal assistance is broad in scope, concentrated in cabinet-level agencies, and weighted toward project grants.
• There is an abundance of STEM-related programs across the federal government, but just three agencies administer over half of all STEM-related programs.
• Relatively few programs prioritize rural communities.
• Even fewer programs prioritize preK–12 STEM education in rural communities.
• Unsurprisingly, the vast majority of NSF grants (in the directorates included here) serve preK–12 STEM but, again, relatively few also serve rural communities.
• There is untapped potential scholarly capacity among NSF grantees outside the STEM Education directorate.

Federal Formula Grant and Project Grant Programs by Agency

Federal agencies provide assistance, as shown in Table B-5, predominantly through project grants rather than formula grants. The use of project grants necessarily implies that agencies likely have greater flexibility to target resources effectively by leveraging expertise within the agencies. The FPI dataset catalogues 1,946 formula and project grant programs across all federal agencies. Of these, 1,689 (87%) are project grant programs and 257 (13%) are formula grant programs. Seven (of 44) agencies—the Departments of Agriculture, Education, Health and Human Services (HHS), Justice, Interior, Transportation, and the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA)—account for almost 70 percent of the grant programs across all agencies. HHS accounts for over 21 percent of all programs, administering 334 project grant programs and 75 formula grant programs. Interior and Agriculture account for about 12 percent each (238 project grants and 10 formula grants, and 215 and 27, respectively).

Numbers of Federal Programs Related to PreK–12, STEM Education, and Workforce Development in Rural Communities

Cabinet-level agencies operate all but a few of the federal programs related to preK–12, STEM, rural communities, and workforce development.

This is unsurprising as noncabinet-level agencies tend to be smaller and focused on highly specific policy issues. NASA and NSF stand out among other agencies: both are organized into directorates and AL numbers are assigned at the directorate level rather than to individual programs in the directorates. As such, it appears that NASA and NSF fund very few programs and the data do not fully reflect the breadth and depth of their work.

Table B-4 displays the number and percentages of preK–12, STEM, rural, and workforce grants by agency. It is important to note that these are duplicated counts; that is, a single program can be counted in none, one, multiple, or all of the analytic categories.

PreK–12: Over half (58%) of all federal preK–12 education programs are administered by just three agencies: Education (90 programs, 29.6%), Health and Human Services (62 programs, 20.4%), and Agriculture (25 programs, 8.2%). These 339 programs constitute 15.6 percent of all federal programs.

STEM: In contrast, almost 70 percent of all federal programs relate directly or indirectly to science, technology, engineering, or mathematics. Three agencies account for about half (52%) of all 1,355 STEM-related programs: Health and Human Services (351 programs, 25.9%), Interior (198 programs, 14.6%), and Agriculture (154 programs, 11.4%).

Rural: While STEM abounds across federal programs, a mere 13.6 percent (265) of federal programs explicitly mention rural communities as a focus, target, context, or beneficiary. These programs are highly concentrated in a few agencies. Agriculture alone accounts for 34 percent (90 programs) of federal rural programs. Agriculture, HHS, and Interior combined account for 54.3 percent of federal programs. Transportation and EPA bring the total to 68.3 percent of rural programs in five departments.

Workforce: Workforce development follows a similar pattern of concentration in a similar set of agencies. Four agencies—Health and Human Services (107 programs, 36.8%), Education (39 programs, 13.4%), Labor (26 programs, 8.9%), and Agriculture (19 programs, 6.5%)—administer two thirds (66%) of federal workforce development programs.

PreK–12 and STEM Programs

Of the 170 programs (8.7% of all programs) that can be characterized as concerning both preK–12 and STEM, almost two thirds (63.5%) are administered by Health and Human Services, Education, Commerce, Agriculture, and the Environmental Protection Agency (Table B-5).

TABLE B-5 Number and Percentage of PreK–12 and STEM Programs, by Federal Agency

SOURCE: Tabulation of data from Office of Management and Budget (2024).

PreK–12 and Rural Programs

Sixty-five programs (3.3% of all programs) at the intersection of preK–12 education programs in rural communities can be characterized as both preK–12 and rural (Table B-6). They are relatively evenly distributed across 15 agencies, although 46 percent are in Agriculture, Health and Human Services, State, Commerce, and the Environmental Protection Agency.

TABLE B-6 Number and Percentage of PreK–12 and Rural Programs, by Federal Agency

SOURCE: Tabulation of data from Office of Management and Budget (2024).

PreK–12 and Workforce Development Programs

Twenty agencies administer 95 programs at the intersection of preK–12 education and workforce development (Table B-7). Education and Health and Human Services administer about half (50.5%). Together with Labor and Defense, four agencies administer 64 percent of the federal preK–12 education and workforce programs.

PreK–12, STEM Programs in Rural Communities

Eleven agencies offer 39 programs—37 project grant programs and 2 formula grant programs at the intersection of preK–12 education and STEM programs in rural communities (Table B-8).

PreK–12, STEM, Workforce Programs

Fourteen agencies offer 62 programs—51 project grant programs and 11 formula grant programs—at the intersection of preK–12 education, STEM, and workforce (Table B-9). The Departments of Health and Human Services and Education together offer half of these programs.

TABLE B-7 Number and Percentage of PreK–12 and Workforce Development Programs, by Federal Agency

SOURCE: Tabulation of data from Office of Management and Budget (2024).

PreK–12, STEM, Workforce Programs in Rural Communities

A search for federal efforts supporting preK–12 STEM education and workforce development in rural areas reveals 11 programs (Table B-10). These 11 illustrate the main conclusion of this analysis: that while the federal government invests broadly (in terms of the sheer number of programs), very many of these programs are at best tangentially related to preK–12 education, STEM, rural communities, or workforce development. And many of those that are more directly relevant rely on grantees’ choice to focus on preK–12 education, STEM, rural communities, or workforce development (see, for example, the Community Services Block Grant; U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, 2022). NASA’s Office of STEM

Engagement (which is actually a collection of programs) offers a different, strategic, and intentional approach to supporting preK–12 STEM education and workforce development. Even this program, however, could be more strategically targeted toward rural communities.

REFERENCES

This page intentionally left blank.