2009 US Budget Holds Mixed News For Science

sciencehabit writes "ScienceNOW has the details on the impacts of President Bush's appropriation request — bad news for biomedicine, better news for the physical sciences. Some agencies really get slammed and many projects are jeopardized. The Bush administration's theory is that a 5-year run-up in National Institutes of Health funding, which ended in 2003, left the federal funding picture seriously unbalanced. Each year since then the administration's budget request for science has moved to shift the balance. Biomedical researchers are expected to lobby hard in Congress for relief. The NYTimes notes that prognosticators expect Congress not to act on a budget until the next President arrives, betting on it being a Democrat. "

Comments

Re:GNAA

[Pojut]

I rarely respond to trolls, but...what the hell is that ASCII art supposed to be?

Independent Science

[pudge]

The bad news for science is where there IS funding. Science should be independent of government as much as possible.

Re: Independent Science

[Black Parrot]

The bad news for science is where there IS funding. Science should be independent of government as much as possible. AFAICT, federally funded science has historically been pretty independent of political meddling.

Of course, you might be experiencing difficulties if you are researching climate change or the effectiveness of abstinence-only programs under the current administration, but hopefully that's a short-term blip on an otherwise effective system.

Re:Independent Science

[pudge]

The Congress shall have Power To lay and collect Taxes, Duties, Imposts and Excises, to pay the Debts and provide for the common Defence and general Welfare of the United States The spending power is easy to miss. It's up there at the beginning of the enumerated powers in Article I, section 8. No, this is a common misconception. There is no broad "spending power." The spending power was limited "to pay the Debts and provide for the common Defence and general Welfare of the United States." But obviously, that doesn't mean the spending can be on anything related to those things. That is a description of what follows in the rest of Section 8: a preamble, not a broad enumeration of power. The person who wrote the Bill of Rights, including the Tenth Amendment, dismissed this faulty interpretation many years ago:

If Congress can do whatever in their discretion can be done by money, and will promote the General Welfare, the Government is no longer a limited one, possessing enumerated powers, but an indefinite one, subject to particular exceptions.

And:

If Congress can employ money indefinitely to the general welfare, and are the sole and supreme judges of the general welfare, they may take the care of religion into their Own hands; they may a point teachers in every state, county, and parish, and pay them out of their public treasury; they may take into their own hands the education of children, establishing in like manner schools throughout the Union; they may assume the provision for the poor; they may undertake the regulation of all roads other than post-roads; in short, every thing, from the highest object of state legislation down to the most minute object of police, would be thrown under the power of Congress; for every object I have mentioned would admit of the application of money, and might be called, if Congress pleased, provisions for the general welfare. ... I venture to declare it as my opinion, that, were the power of Congress to be established in the latitude contended for, it would subvert the very foundations, and transmute the very nature of the limited government established by the people of America ...

Granted, many of those things, our federal government does today: they pay for teachers, take into their own hands the education of children, assume provision for the poor, undertake regulation of all roads, regulate police.

But as James Madison said, this is all unconstitutional.

No Child Left Behind is just as much, if not more, a violation of my rights under the Constitution as anything else Bush is accused of doing, whether it is "warrantless wiretapping" or "free speech zones." The Constitution and its authors are quite clear.

Re:Should be cut entirely

[MozeeToby]

Example: Biotech company developes two new treatments for diabetes. One is administered daily in pill form and costs $10 a pill to make but can be sold at $100 a pill comercially. The other is a one time treatment that would cost $200, most of which would go to the doctors performing the procedure.

Quiz: Which do you think will be released to the public?

For the record, biotech companies are not all evil, all the time. They have done great things and not always just for the bottom line. But to have no public funding for public medical research seams extremely dangerous to me.

Slow News Day??

[mpapet]

First pass at the budget is ALWAYS ignored.

The parties are working up their versions of a budget and waiting for the elections to play out. In the meantime, they'll temporarily fund the government.

For those hawks that believe that private industry can do research "better" I offer the following.

1. Some research is so basic that there's no near-term mass-market application.

2. If the research can't become a profit center, it's dropped. This is already happening in the now-privatized University R&D and it happened long, long ago in business.

3. Most countries have some kind of nationalized R&D AND economic planning to sell the R&D. This model appears gets about the same results as the looser American style.

4. Corporate R&D is mostly stealing ideas from someone else who cannot afford litigation.

Re:Should be cut entirely

[krlynch]

If you had said "Applied Technology and product research should be cut entirely", I'd agree with you. But the private sector already pays the vast majority of that. Further, private industry already pays for a 2/3 majority of all R&D research in the United States: http://www.aaas.org/spp/rd/guitotal.htm As you can see from the graphs, that fraction has been increasing every year, (in real dollar terms!) since the early 1970s. Clearly, private industry DOES see many areas where funding large R&D programs brings it a competitive advantage.

But this does not in any way support the contention that government funded "scientific research" should be cut entirely. There are many areas of research whose outcomes are so uncertain that it doesn't make any sense for private enterprise to finance them, but where the net economic and social benefits are very long term and very positive. Consider research on the germ theory or disease, or the discovery of the electron. Together, those fields for the bedrock of all modern economies. Space exploration and fusion power research are two modern examples where the fundamental research could not possibly be supported directly by private enterprise without governmental assistance. There are other areas related specifically to government responsibilities (defense, law enforcement, environmental stewardship, etc.) where I would expect the government to provide funding. Finally, there are a number of research areas with a large societal benefit, but little to no profit or market advantage, where private actors shouldn't be expected to fill. The modern archetype is vaccine research.

I'm as big a fan of the free market and constitutional restrictions on government action as the next guy, but I still accept that there are areas that there are things, like government funding of fundamental research, that would not be supported but for government intervention.

Re: But funding is up?

[Black Parrot]

Science has been bad news for Bush's agenda. Bush has spent more on science than any other President in the history of the United States, so to say that he is anti-science is sharply distortionary. Did he actually say that? Or did he merely call attention to the fact that the Bush administration has a long track record of trying to hush up the results of scientific enquiry that belie the myths of his corporate/neocon agenda?

Re: But funding is up?

[Noksagt]

The OP titled his post "Is it a surprise?"

This implies that the proposed budget is very low in science. It isn't. It is very good for the physical sciences (with double-digit percentage increases to many agencies).

You might have a point if the post were titled "Yeah, but...." & the text were "even with funding, Bush isn't pro-science."

This budget is a joke

[mzs]

This is a lame duck president. Congress will wait for a new president before doing anything. Before the budget will get passed there will be at least one continuing resolution where funding will be at the current very low levels across the board for science. Then Congress, realizing it needs to deal with the ballooning budget problems, will need to pass a lean budget for science in order to fund things like welfare. Only NASA will be largely spared since it is so spread-out over many Congressional districts.

There is no hope for science funding in the emergency stimulus bill and only a little hope for a April/May supplemental appropriations bill tacked onto war spending. So there will be a long time at 2008 levels of funding and then cuts and basically level funding for the rest in the eventual 2009 budget passed by Congress and signed by the then president.

Don't believe me, read what the Director of Fermilab thinks:

http://www.fnal.gov/pub/today/archive_2008/today08-02-05.html

The only real hope for science funding is through universities really. If you know any university trustees, let them know about the problems. If these wealthy and well connected people feel that their companies are at risk due to the US trailing in science, then they can make an impact with Representative and Senators. We need more people like Craig Barrett, the chairman of Intel, expressing why science funding is key.

http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2008/01/20/EDFDUHP1I.DTL

Re:Yeah...

[flyingsquid]

That's the problem with federal funding... At first, it's cool that you can get hold of some, then it becomes a godsend, then it's a desperately needed commodity that you must have more and more of, at any cost and damn the consequences... Sorta like Cocaine in a way.

I'm always baffled to see people on Slashdot arguing we shouldn't fund basic research. Would we even be having this discussion without federally funded research? It was a federally funded research organization, DARPA, which invented the internet after all, not private industry. The World Wide Web was invented at CERN, and government-funded projects like Colossus and ENIAC were vital to the development of the modern computer.

Even if we spend billions of dollars a year on basic research, the occasional runaway success like the internet does so much to benefit the economy that it more than pays for itself. You have to spend money to make money, and we've done pretty well by investing in technology and medicine over the past 50 years.

No, actually

[C18H21NO3]

"The Constitution does not give the authority to the U.S. to do things that are in the USA's best interest, but only those things which the Constitution specifically allows the U.S. to do (Tenth Amendment)."

Um, actually that's not right, as the Constitution does, in fact, give authority to act in the USA's best interest. And the "specifically allows" argument is wrong too. It's something people trot out when things like this get discussed, but it isn't true and really never has been.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/General_Welfare_Clause

"The Congress shall have Power To lay and collect Taxes, Duties, Imposts and Excises, to pay the Debts and provide for the common Defence and general Welfare of the United States"

Now, SPECIFICALLY what is the "general Welfare" and how can the US go about providing for it?

Now you see why that argument doesn't work.

Re:Yeah...

[Penguinisto]

I have no kick against funding basic research at all...

My problem is that this funding goes from being a benevolent grant to a research institution, to becoming a perceived right and entitlement.

Note that this doesn't apply to just research grants, either - everything from corporate welfare programs to Medicare becomes an annual contest to see who can squeeze the most milk out of the governmental teat. What were once programs designed as social safety nets and promotional programs, have become horrific and competing demands for more, more more...

• don't boost Medicare as much as the AARP demands? Why, you beast you! How DARE you leave the elderly to die!
• don't boost educational funding as much as demanded by the teacher unions and school districts? "You're hurting our kids!" (in spite of the fact that education was once a completely state and locally-funded thing...)
• don't boost (insert corporate welfare program here) by as much as (insert lobbyist org here) demanded? You're killing off (insert industry here)!

Meanwhile? You, me, and most other rational human beings know full well that for the most part, we're spending (m/b)illions more this year than we did last year. Nobody is going to die, no business collapses, no school fails - but each year the hyperbole comes marching along.

You know? 100 years ago, congress-critters would compete for re-election by bragging about how they kept the government out of everyones' lives. Now they do it by bragging on how much pork they managed to drag home to their respective constituencies.

Again, I have no kick against funding things such as research, industry promotional programs, and social safety net programs. However, I think that each and every one of them should --with damned few exceptions-- have to either get a set non-renewable amount for a set period of time (and not a dime more), or they must re-compete each year for the same level of funding they got the year before. Then we have a non-political panel at the OMB go over each program with a scalpel, and start hacking/slashing those programs that have no provable value at all (e.g. corporate welfare). The savings get rolled into next year's budget.

/P