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Budget Agreement Boosts US Science (sciencemag.org)
sciencehabit writes: The National Institutes of Health (NIH) leads the way among U.S science agencies getting increases in the final 2016 spending bill released today. NIH is the winner in absolute dollars. It gets a bump of $2 billion, or 6.6%, from its current budget of $30.1 billion. Spending on science programs at NASA would grow by 6.6%, to $5.6 billion, and rise by 5.6% in the Department of Energy's (DOE's) Office of Science, to $5.35 billion. The National Science Foundation would receive an additional $119 million, or 1.6%, to $7.46 billion, and the Advanced Research Projects Agency-Energy would get a 6% boost, to $291 million.
NASA in particular got great allocations for planetary science and commercial crew.
Now all they need to do is pass the thing. Does anyone know what kind of poison pill has been inserted yet, which will cause somebody to get off the boat and sink it? We all know there is one...
It's a sad state when the budget process has been reduced to such cynicism, but here we are.
Slashdot still doesnâ(TM)t support Unicode after it was added to the HTML standard in 1997.
you're talking real money. E. Dirksen
This budget has been agreed to by Obama and the Republican leadership in Congress, including Paul Ryan, and Congressional Democrats have expressed approval and talked about their "wins".
Obama likes it because they put off paying for Obamacare another couple of years. The taxes on health insurance and medical equipment will be delayed until after the election and 2020, respectively.
... except for two things:
1) The giant waste of money known as the SLS/Space Launch System, whose budget request was a huge 1,3 billion for this year, was instead given 2 billion. Congress clearly likes flushing money down the toilet.
2) The STMD/Space Technology Mission Directorate has been having its budget cut each year, and while it got a nominal rise this year, it was tasked with taking over RESTORE-L from the ISS's budget, so it's yet another negative. STMD is the branch which develops and tests new technologies that have the potential to make spaceflight cheaper and safer.
That said, everything else looks good. Commercial crew is fully funded. Planetary science was increased, meaning that they're not going to have to cut any of their ongoing missions as they would have had to in the president's budget, plutonium production is fully funded, etc - and of course the big Europa mission is on coursse. Even earth science got a boost, which surprises me given the composition of the current US congress.
That was either the start of something bad or the end of something stupid.
Current inflation is 1.3% and let's not forget that today is the day when inflation get's a boost from the feds. Therefore, overall, there's nothing to be excited about.
These agencies often get their environmental research cut during Republican congresses. NASA Earth observing satellites too.
Obama likes it because they put off paying for Obamacare another couple of years. The taxes on health insurance and medical equipment will be delayed until after the election and 2020, respectively.
O has done a masterful job at delaying the biggest cost impacts.
Taxes on health insurance and medical care? Wtf.
Tax the thing you are trying to make more affordable. Nice.
Tax anything...or everything else, to pay for it. Not that. Idiots.
(-1: Post disagrees with my already-settled worldview) is not a valid mod option.
The NIH increase is not enough to add radical new initiatives. In fact, most funded researchers will be lucky if the increase even results in them getting their full requested budget. Many researchers will likely still see overall decreases, while their institutions will likely ask for more funds to cover expenses (such as electricity, gas, space, water, etc). It's better than nothing, but it's not really much of something, either.
If we want to be a competitive nation in terms of scientific research we need to at least fund the NIH enough to meet operating expense increases so researchers can do work and get paid at (or slightly above, if their lucky) the levels of janitors.
Damn_registrars has no butt-hole. Damn_registrars has no use for a butt-hole.
https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20151216/05514933094/as-predicted-congress-turned-cisa-into-clear-surveillance-bill-put-it-into-must-pass-govt-funding-bill.shtml
Article on Techdirt saying someone has stuffed CISA into this bill. Not as horrible as the final draft of CISA proposed yesterday but still rather terrible and still a surveillance bill.
Contact your Rep and Senator today, or this will likely be made law.
Not too happy about Precision Health Initiative.
"Participants will be involved in the design of the Initiative and will have the opportunity to contribute diverse sources of data—including medical records; profiles of the patient’s genes, metabolites (chemical makeup), and microorganisms in and on the body; environmental and lifestyle data; patient-generated information; and personal device and sensor data."
They're looking for a million volunteers to give away all their health related and lifestyle data, to the tune of $215M. Does not seem cool. I expect that this will turn into something like "volunteer your data, or you'll be paying an extra $50/month for your health insurance, compared to someone who *does* "volunteer".
They're also reviving the National Children’s Study to the tune of $165M ("Someone *is* thinking of the children!"), to follow 100,000 children "from the womb to age 21", to determine environmental factors affecting their health. This is the same program the NIH cancelled last December as "infeasible".
"Q: How will this be different from the original NCS?
A: We are going to be leveraging existing cohorts. That way, a good deal of the infrastructure will already be in place with regard to identification and enrollment of potential participants. It will allow us to ask very targeted questions where appropriate."
Again -- not a good feeling about this' they want to centralize existing, theoretically double blind data into a central, non-blind database, so that they can reuse existing cohorts that volunteered for other studies -- but didn't volunteer for this one (but thank you for your participation anyway!).
They also made the so-called R&D tax credit permanent -- not sure how I feel about than one, either, since the National Association of Manufacturers is behind it, and as well all know, most manufacturing happens in China. This should bring some manufacturing back to the U.S. but it's looking like most of that R&D (which amounts to $7B/year in tax exemptions for industry) is going to be to implementation automation so that can happen, rather than employing people.
On the NASA front, it's mostly harmless; Representative John Culberson (R–TX) will be happy, since the robotic mission to Europa (wasn't that the only place the monolith told us *wasn't* ours?!?) is back on, since most of the work is happening in his district.
Overall: medium amount of pork, and some invasion of privacy issues with regard to the NIH: so SSDD...
Taxes on health insurance and medical care? Wtf.
Tax the thing you are trying to make more affordable. Nice.
Well, that all depends on who they're trying to make it affordable for.
In this case, it's taking money from people who already had insurance to pay for those who didn't. That's why people who oppose Obamacare oppose it. It's a direct hit on the middle class, who are already carrying the majority of the tax burden.
But tell people it's free health care and they want it.
http://thehill.com/policy/cybersecurity/262281-cyber-bills-final-language-will-anger-privacy-advocates
Cybersecurity Information Sharing Act is back and this time they even removed some of the few privacy protections it used to have.
Too bad the US will become a surveillance state because of this...
http://motherboard.vice.com/read/lawmakers-have-snuck-cisa-into-a-bill-that-is-guaranteed-to-become-a-law
FUD.
Know-nothing FUD.
http://www.engadget.com/2015/12/16/congress-tucked-cisa-in-budget-bill/
We can end this if we work together: http://www.freestateproject.org/
Congress is giving away all the oil to multinationals. https://www.washingtonpost.com...
If the entirety of those two budgets were misallocated, I'd still call it a remarkably good budget.
Wish I had points to mod this up. That's why they tried to jack the cost every year so far. This year is stable since it was floated out there of another raise in care cost and people went ape shit, understandably so.
The NIH and NSF budgets would need a much larger bump to really kick off some major new initiatives, much less restore funding to useful programs. Translational medicine research programs have stalled, and major disease foundations are having to fund tons of foundational work. Also, there's no "moonshot" type of projects, for example, setting a goal of creating a battery that has 50% more capacity for the same weight (vs current best technology), notable gains in wind or solar efficiency, massive improvements to the power grid, and so on.