Setting down its marker in the debate over next year's federal research budget, the White House today unveiled a plan to keep overall research spending flat while subtly shifting money away from defense and toward clean energy.

The proposed fiscal 2013 budget contains $140.8 billion for research and development. With its increase of $2 billion over fiscal 2012, it closely tracks the inflation rate of 1.4 percent since last year.

Yet the budget includes a 5 percent increase in nondefense research, reflecting the growing energy portfolios at the three largest research agencies after the National Institutes of Health: the Department of Energy, the Pentagon and the National Science Foundation. Each would make a larger foray into clean technology, following through on the goals that President Obama set in his State of the Union address, the White House said today.

"We are at the cusp of a future in which hundreds of thousands of vehicles that do not rely on a gasoline-powered engine will be on our roads, and where millions of homes will be powered by electricity from clean sources," the budget says. "To continue to bring about this vision and to nurture the incalculable number of good ideas that one day will be ready to go from lab to market, we need to make the United States the world leader in innovation."

The National Science Foundation would get $7.4 billion, 5 percent above the current fiscal year, with $203 million of its $340 million influx going toward a new sustainability research program focusing on climate change and renewable energy technologies. An existing clean energy research program would get $14 million more than this year, bringing its budget to $355 million.

The U.S. Global Change Research Program would get $2.6 billion, a 5.6 percent increase.

John Holdren, director of the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy, said during a briefing on the science budget that people should see these shifts as "a reaffirmation of our commitment to addressing the climate change challenge."

The proposed budget also includes $5 billion for the Office of Science at DOE, a $127 million increase from the current fiscal year. Basic energy research would get a $169 million bump to $1.8 billion in fiscal 2013, and the Advanced Research Projects Agency-Energy, or ARPA-E, would get an additional $350 million, up from the $275 million budgeted for the agency in fiscal 2012.

The agency, which focuses on cutting-edge research, says it will start taking applications in early March for about $150 million worth of grants. One area where ARPA-E is moving forward is "electrofuels." The agency recently put out a request for research projects based on deep-sea micro-organisms that get energy from inorganic compounds such as hydrogen and metals or from an electric current.

DOE will make way for new funding in part by cutting a combined 35 projects from ARPA-E and the offices dealing with renewable energy and fossil energy, the agency said today (see related story).

During the Obama administration, federal spending on basic and applied research -- rather than later-stage development work -- has settled at just above $60 billion after a year of record spending in 2009 as part of the president's stimulus package. That is about 50 percent more than the federal government spent on research at the end of the Clinton administration and slightly above the budgets of the George W. Bush administration with their major infusions to medical and defense research.

"In very difficult times, we think this is a very strong science and technology budget overall," Holdren said today.

Holdren will testify on the budget Friday before the House Science Committee.

Ralph Hall, the Texas Republican who chairs the committee, did not have an immediate response to the spending proposal. A spokesman said he will reserve comment until he can more fully study the budget.