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2009 US Budget Holds Mixed News For Science

Posted by kdawson on from the squishy-researchers-beware dept.

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. "

3 of 190 comments (clear)

  1. What's Mixed? by Jeremiah+Cornelius · · Score: 5, Funny

    What's "mixed" about earmarks for the Creation Science Institute?

    --
    "Flyin' in just a sweet place,
    Never been known to fail..."
  2. Not quite the whole truth... by Roger+W+Moore · · Score: 5, Informative

    It is very good for the physical sciences (with double-digit percentage increases to many agencies).

    The news is not all that good. What you have to remember is that this 17% is coming on top of a cut in 2008 so the net increase is far smaller. Not only that but the effects of the cut this year were greatly magnified because they were retroactively made 3 months into the financial year! Hence some of the money which was cut had already been spent and, since it could not be retroactively reclaimed, resulted in far greater damage to the programs.

    That being said I'm sure my american colleagues will be happy with this but, since it was the US parliament which butchered the budget this year I don't think they'll be celebrating until it actually gets enacted.

  3. Re:Yeah... by flyingsquid · · Score: 5, Insightful
    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.