In this paper we examine the connections between federal funding for university research and development (R&D) in chemistry and a variety of scientific and economic outcomes.  We do this using a panel of the top 150 research universities in terms of federal funding from 1990 – 2009.  We are interested in understanding the impact of federal R&D funding on a range of outcomes typically produced by university scientists.  Fortunately for our purposes, shifts in the level of Federal support for science over the past 20 years in conjunction with changes in the relative priority of different fields of research have produced a considerable degree of temporal variation in funding levels over time.  We use panel instrumental variable estimators to obtain estimates of the marginal effects of Federal R&D funding in the chemical sciences on publications (both raw counts and citation adjusted), patents, doctoral students trained, and postdocs.  Our preliminary findings indicate that federal research funding is associated with larger numbers of graduate students and postdocs and has a causal impact on research publications.   We plan to explore the impact of federal research funding on patents as well.