(CNS News) — The Obama administration, as a long-term goal, sought to spend three percent of the economy — or about $450 billion — on research and development of “transformational solutions to Nation’s challenges,” and it planned to prioritize spending on “solar energy, next-generation biofuels, and sustainable green buildings and building retrofit technologies.”

A July 21, 2010 White House memo by John Holdren, director of the Office of Science and Technology (OSTP), and then Office of Management and Budget (OMB) Director Peter Orszag said the three percent of Gross Domestic Product would be from public and private investment for research and development.

The memo, obtained through a Freedom of Information Act request by CNSNews.com, is directed to the heads of all executive branch departments and agencies about budgeting priorities.

It calls for making global warming a key priority in budgeting. Federal departments and agencies are also expected to target priorities at “understanding, adapting to and mitigating the impacts of global climate change,” the memo said. This section of the memo also states that the administration should “Prioritize research for measuring, reporting and verifying greenhouse gas emissions.”The memo states the administration’s long-term goal of more money for green transformative technology.

“The President has a long-term goal that R&D [research and development] investments (both private and federal) in the United States should reach three percent of the Gross Domestic Product (GDP),” the Holdren-Orszag memo states. “In order to understand the status of the federal share of this goal, agencies are expected to work in close collaboration with OMB and OSTP to accurately classify and report R&D investment activities.”

The current Gross Domestic Product is $15.01 trillion, according to the U.S. Bureau of Economic Activity, of which three percent would be $450.3 billion. That would be more than the recent $447 billion jobs bill that Obama proposed and about half the cost of the $862 billion recovery act passed in February 2009.

“Agencies should pursue transformational solutions to the Nation’s practical challenges, and budget submission should therefore explain how agencies will support long-term, visionary thinkers proposing high-risk, high-return (or ‘potentially transformative’) research,” the July 2010 memo says.