The Kishida Cabinet's "key policies" are evident in MEXT's substantial science and technology budget for 2022

The conventional theory has been that if a large supplementary budget is added during a financial year, the next initial budget will be reduced because of accelerated project budgets, yet the FY2022 budget of the Ministry of Education, Culture, Sports, Science, and Technology (MEXT) increased despite an earlier supplementary budget of ¥1 trillion. This is suggestive of the importance the Kishida Cabinet attaches to science and technology. Considering MEXT as a whole, the budget was 5 trillion 390.1 billion yen, a decrease of 2.4 billion, but this includes a budget for promoting science and technology (exclusively used for science and technology) of 1 trillion 378.8 billion yen, an increase of 15 billion. As a result, most of the new requests are included in the supplementary budget and the FY2022 budget draft, making the content quite substantial.

The supplementary budget allows for ¥11 billion in international leading research grants, and the initial draft budget appropriates ¥237.7 billion, the same amount as the previous year. In addition to ¥42.8 billion, which was the budget of the previous year, the Strategic Basic Research Programs (for the creation of new technology seeds) also received a supplementary budget of ¥11 billion. The Mirai Program also received ¥9.1 billion and the World Premier International Research Center (WPI) Initiative ¥6.1 billion, the same as for the previous year. In addition, the budget includes new projects, such as the Research Data Ecosystem Building Program, which promotes AI utilization, which received 1 billion yen, the Investigative Research on Next-Generation Computing Systems, which received 400 million yen, and the Next-Generation Semiconductor Production Base Formation Program, which received 900 million yen (supplementary budget of 3 billion yen).