University spends $280k in national lobbying
USC slashed its spending on lobbying the federal government during the Great Recession, but since 2009 those levels have more than doubled, according to recent filings with the Senate Office of Public Records.
The university spent $280,000 in 2011 to lobby Congress and federal agencies, which was according to those records, a jump from $130,000 in 2009. That increase brought spending closer to its 2007 level, when USC spent $260,000.
In recent years, the face of that lobbying has also changed, according to Steven Beckham, the university’s director of federal relations.
As politicians and the public focus increasingly on shrinking the federal budget, Beckham and the Podesta Group, a high-profile Washington, D.C. lobbying firm that USC hired in 2010, have worked less to advocate for specific initiatives and more to maintain research and financial aid funding.
Beckham and other lobbyists used to encourage representatives to include earmarks for university projects; now, he asks them “to make strategic cuts, rather than basic, across-the-board cuts,” he said.
Regardless, he expects that departments throughout the government will see smaller budgets, and that will affect USC.
“I think everyone’s going to have to be prepared for cuts in their areas,” Beckham said. “It’s going to be a shared pain kind of thing, but what you try to do is to make the case for financial aid for students. That is our future ... Second is basic research. You hope that you’re doing things in promising areas, which the university is, that might lead to future economic developments.”
Currently students at the Columbia campus receive a total of $230 million in federal financial aid, Beckham said. Last year, nearly $141.9 million in federal grants funded about 63 percent of USC’s research spending, according to documents on the Office of Research’s website.
Federal research funding at USC has increased 20.1 percent since 2007, growing alongside a 22.5 percent increase in the size of the university’s total budget of sponsored awards.
But according to Vice President for Research Prakash Nagarkatti, that growth could be jeopardized by planned cuts to the federal budget in 2013, which were triggered after the so-called congressional supercommittee failed to agree on a smaller budget last year.
As a result, his office has begun planning how it can maintain its budget’s growth.
“Federal funding has remained flat or might start seeing a little bit of decline in 2013, so the question is, ‘How do we at USC compete with other institutions?’” Nagarkatti said. “We need to build teams of interdisciplinary scientists and engineers that can then focus on problems that are unique to our community and unique to our state.”
Along those lines, the Office of Research formed the Advanced Support Program for Integration of Research Excellence — one of three “ASPIRE” programs — last year to encourage collaboration between schools, Nagarkatti said. The program provides a grant of up to $100,000 to fund projects involving at least two colleges or schools at the university.
Nagarkatti also suggested that USC may begin to seek out and focus on a few specialty fields, like pharmacy or biomedical engineering, rather than pursue a more generalist approach.
“We want to focus on maybe about eight or 10 niche areas that we’ve identified and then put resources into that,” he said. “We can’t do everything.”