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

Is this a surprise?

[GodfatherofSoul]

Science has been bad news for Bush's agenda.

Yeah...

[Otter]

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.

Meanwhile, it didn't do it any long-term favors to biomedical research, as the NIH and university leaderships handled their huge influx of money about as well as Paris Hilton and Lindsay Lohan did with theirs. There are dozens of universities with new buildings they were planning to pay off with NIH overhead, that are now completely screwed.

Re:Slow News Day??

[the computer guy nex]

"1. Some research is so basic that there's no near-term mass-market application."
So you want a federal government to fund science that has no application for the masses? Sounds like something that benefits the few rather than the many, which is better done in the private sector. I don't want my tax dollars at work for something that benefits almost no one. "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."
Right down the road from me the University of Illinois is building a new $300,000,000 supercomputer funded by private donations, including my own. If the University is good enough, it will have the funding. Free market determines this. "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."
So you want to compare the number of scientific discoveries and new useful products developed by foreign governments compared to private companies within the United States? Are you crazy? "4. Corporate R&D is mostly stealing ideas from someone else who cannot afford litigation."
Corporate R&D is buying ideas, not stealing. While our patent system needs work, it does have a purpose.

It is the fault of Congress

[Noksagt]

It is true that Bush does not make policy decisions based on scientific research and it is true that some of his personal beliefs run counter to current scientific understanding. This has impacted what science gets funded (as many ex-pat stem cell researchers now in Singapore would tell you).

However, Bush has budgeted to give science in general quite a bit more funding than what Congress has been willing to sign. He proposed large increases last year, which got cut by Congress & his proposed increases in the physical science this year are actually quite good. (Good enough that surely some think that it isn't fiscally conservative.)

I'm personally writing my representatives in Congress asking them to not slash the proposed increases as they have done in the past.

Re:But funding is up?

[tjstork]

Hmm, well I don't believe that for a second, especially if one adjusts for inflation, total budget size, etc. But I'm willing to entertain that claim if you can provide some concrete references

http://www.americanprogress.org/issues/2006/07/b1984135.html

Is one you might believe. That's a fairly progressive web site and the figures do not include research for military purposes. Scroll down and you'll see that the biggest spender is Bush. Really, just look at the deficits, and ask yourself, what -hasn't- Bush spent money on!

Re:Constituionality

[pudge]

I'm glad that you have that sense of intellectual contentment (dare I say idealism?). It must be lonely there, as it seems Hamilton and the anti-Federalists have had the last word! Would you say the same to someone who, if we had decades of erosion of all free speech rights, said that those laws abridging free speech were unconstitutional? I am simply asserting civil liberties here, of no less importance, value, or legal right than free speech rights.

I personally think that your reading is even narrower than Madison's Nah.

in Federalist 41, he wrote a great deal about the necessities of funding for defense Yes, which is specifically mentioned in Article I, Section 8. It's an enumerated power.

Had Madison been around long enough to read Szilard and Einstein's letter warning of a nuclear threat from Germany & had he guaged such a threat as realistic, I have little doubt that Madison would have approved of the Manhattan project and the modern national labs that were commissioned to that end. And I would too. I did not imply that ALL science funding is unconstitutional; if it has a specific Section 8 purpose, then it is not unconstitutional, as per the "necessary and proper" clause.

The overwhelming majority of government-funded science research, however, does not have such a legitimate purpose.