The Department of Homeland Security will merge three of its existing academic research centers and create four new centers, to study natural disasters, border security, explosives detection, and maritime security, Congressional Quarterly reported last week.

The merger, scheduled for 2010, is part of the department’s effort to eliminate overlap in its Centers of Excellence program, which finances homeland-security research by university consortia. The three centers that will be merged — the Center for Advancing Microbial Risk Assessment, the National Center for Foreign Animal and Zoonotic Disease Defense, and the National Center for Food Protection and Defense — all conduct research on chemical and biological terrorism.

The Centers of Excellence program came under scrutiny last year from Congress, which criticized how the department’s Science and Technology Directorate had managed its entire research portfolio. To punish the directorate, legislators slashed $12-million from the budget of the Office of University Programs and said they would withhold $50-million of its total research budget in the 2007 fiscal year until they received a report describing the agency’s efforts to “address financial-management deficiencies, improve its management controls, and implement performance measures and evaluations.” They also demanded a briefing, within 60 days of when the bill was signed into law, on the department’s goals and projected outcomes for its six Centers of Excellence.

Responding to that demand, the department has conducted a review of its university-research program and issued a proposal to Congress that calls for merging three of the seven existing centers and creating four new centers to conduct research in new areas. It issued requests for proposals for the new centers earlier this month.