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White House Seeks 72 Percent Cut To Clean Energy Research (engadget.com)
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Engadget: The Trump administration has made it very clear that it is pro fossil fuels and has little interest in pushing programs the promote renewable energy. Now, the Washington Post reports that the president's proposed 2019 budget slashes funds for Energy Department programs focused on energy efficiency. While the proposal is just a jumping off point, the fact that it seeks to cut such funding by 72 percent underscores where the administration's interests lie and in which direction its policies will continue to go. The draft budget documents viewed by Washington Post staff showed that the president is looking to cut the Energy Department's Office of Energy Efficiency and Renewable Energy (EERE) budget to $575.5 million, down from the current $2.04 billion level. Included in the budget cuts are funds for programs researching fuel efficient vehicles, bioenergy technologies, solar energy technology and electric car technologies. Additionally, the draft budget proposal seeks to cut jobs, dropping staff levels from 680 down to 450. One EERE employee told the Washington Post, "It shows that we've made no inroads in terms of convincing the administration of our value, and if anything, our value based on these numbers has dropped." The report notes that the Energy Department had requested less extreme spending cuts, but the Office of Management and Budget pushed for the more substantial ones found in the draft proposal. It's also worth noting that the proposal could still be changed before being released in February.
https://news.slashdot.org/stor...
This administration is determined to make the USA more like a third world country.
The real "Libtards" are the Libertarians!
I saw something earlier today about a "GOP train wreck". Is this connected to that story, or does it just refer to the Republicans more generally?
You are welcome on my lawn.
The Democrats might be bought and paid for, but at least their sponsors are leaders for the 21st century instead of the 19th.
This is probably not a big deal, IMHO. Sure, some groups will be stymied by the lost of tax breaks and grants. But let's face it; solar and wind are going to become cheaper than fossil fuels in the long term anyway (hell, it's a dead heat right this minute) and we won't need government funding for renewables to propagate. In fact, I would rather the feds just get out of the way.
Now, if you'll excuse me, I have backups to corrupt.
Is this a parody of senile elderly right wingers, or do you really think random all caps words, incomplete sentences, and ridiculous bragging are a good form of argumentation?
- None can love freedom heartily, but good men; the rest love not freedom, but license. -- John Milton
We need to stop giving corporations money for investing in future profitable endeavors.
When companies invest in solar or wind technology, maybe it will be profitable, or maybe not. But either way, much of the benefit goes to the public in the form of avoided externalities. Without public funding, companies will still research alternative energy, but will do much less than is optimal from the public's perspective.
Subsidies for alternative energy research make way more sense than subsidies for alternative energy production. We should do more of the former, and less of the latter.
You do realize that a lot of basic research is done at these national labs, that often times, will not occur in private industry because the investment is too high and returns aren't quick enough. Businesses will seek profit for their shareholders, not what's good for humanity.
Businesses often depend on this basic research to be released to public to make products and services from but someone has to do the research. This cut also hits solar energy (which is currently only one of the few realistic long term energy sources we're aware of as a species), battery research (which is critical for many future developments--hell you can even pour your "clean" coal energy into batteries, they're agnostic...), and more.
What Trump and the GOP are calling "Make America Great Again" is just a re-branding of "Bring Back the Good-Old Days". They want to turn back the calendar to some decade before the 1960's, in every way that matters, and this is just a small part of that agenda. Take a look at how America was, socio-politically, in the 1950's and before, and you'll get an idea of the hell-hole they want to drag us back to.. but I diverge. This is one of the most retarded things Trump has done. Of course it probably won't have any effect on industry, since the energy industry as a whole has some actually intelligent people working for it who see that fossil fuels' days are numbered and that other sources are going to be necessary if we want to continue having a civilization; the only real effect this will have is to further prove that Trump and his cronies aren't living in the Real World and are not fit to lead. We won't be 'making America great again' by being left behind by the rest of the industrialized world; we sure as fuck won't be impressing anyone when the likes of China passes us up because our so-called 'leadership' has it's collective head up it's collective ass like this.
That's true. The government's role should be to make the market work efficiently, which means eliminating market failures such as monopolies and negative externalities.
But the federal government doesn't seem to be eager to internalize negative externalities by charging polluters the cost of air pollution, about $1,000 per person annually. Instead, the current administration has been doing the opposite by dismantling protections!
While it lasted, the government's investments in clean energy research were a good way to repay its negligence in making sure the market cleaned up after itself. Ending the research will only accelerate the environmental debt that our children and grandchildren will inherit from us.
Any sufficiently unpopular but cohesive argument is indistinguishable from trolling.
MAGAers are such snowflakes...
Come on.. This is a leaked document which is admitted to be a draft, subject to wholesale changes, of a budget request from the DOE, which will be edited at the Whitehouse before the president presents it to Congress with a bunch of other similar documents. Congress will ignore the president's input and draft their own budget in the house, argue for months over in committee, sent to the floor of the house, finally arrive at something that won't be recognizable as the original draft that the house passes as a "budget" which will be taken up by the Senate who will likely add their own amendments in committee and from the floor which if it actually passes, will head back to the reconciliation committee to be possibly edited again before both chambers vote to pass it or not.
How's this even news fit to print by a respected news paper much less "News for nerds" on Slash Dot? There is a nearly zero chance these numbers will survive all the coming edits driven by the endless debate in congress.
How do you think it gets changed?
It's public outrage that causes items like this to get scrapped. Extreme cuts like this are designed to change the Overton window so they can "compromise" on slightly less extreme cuts later on. The earlier the uproar the less chance they have to shift the debate.
I stole this Sig
And military strength flows from a strong economy, strong education, leading research, etc. Good luck having a strong military for long without the rest.
"What, like with a cloth or something?"
The DOE performed basic research in the 1970s that led directly to our leadership in today's fracking technology. Basic research funded by the government can be critical to a nation's technology and economic strength. As the articles note, it's not about choosing technologies, but helping them along. This is an important distinction, but it's clear that industry does not always fund basic research very well, esp. that with a long time to pay off. http://www.aei.org/publication... https://www.forbes.com/sites/l...
Seriously, we need to add a lot more geothermal and SMR nukes (not the gen 3/3+ crap from toshiba, etc) that are affordable, clean energy, and will provide base-load power, as opposed to wind/solar. Do not get me wrong. Both of these are needed and will continue. States are backing solar, and wind is ready to drop all subsidies on anyways.
As to dropping EV subsidies, Tesla has always begged for it since all of their competitors have NEVER used it correctly. And they are correct. Those subsidies SHOULD have been used on 150 MPC EVs and not on 75 MPC/hybrids which then charge in the daytime increasing demand and then pushing coal plants.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
If you think Musk's engineers don't rely on publications performed under government funding (around the world) to advance, then you're crazy. Advances are certainly made by private industry, but a lot of pieces come from public funded research.
It's like saying Musk's Tesla group haven't benefited from any research and development into SLAM methodologies, which built off of much research in computer vision to help build their autopilot feature and self driving vehicles. Take away all public funded research in computer vision, for example, and lane assisted driving wouldn't be remotely near where it is today. It might eventually be developed as a competitive requirement as industry inched into this territory.
I'm no material scientist but I suspect much of the battery technology used can be traced back to leaps developed under or as a result of public funded research.
Research is costly and high risk of failure so businesses typically minimize research to the point of keeping a competitive advantage. Not only that, if you rely strictly on private industry to do all the research, you end up in situations like we have now in the US with the pharmaceutical industry (which is even higher risk of failure and overhead investment).
Right, let's socialize the cost and privatize the profits. Oh, wait, isn't that what so many people complain about with government programs? Maybe the companies should invest in their own research if they are going to profit from it.
Public funding of research is a terrible idea. The decisions on who gets the money is decided by a bunch of lawyers in Congress based on how many votes it will buy them in their re-election campaign, not on it's ability to reduce pollution.
I can see some public funded research as valuable. We've come a long way in prosthetic limbs because the government was looking for ways to treat wounded soldiers. That makes sense from the government's standpoint, since the government "broke" these warriors then they should do what they can to "fix" them. Since it's government funded this research goes out to help people injured in accidents, with birth defects, and so on. There is no doubt some lawyers still buying votes with this but there is at least some check on this with a goal to protecting the nation. It's going to get difficult to recruit people to defend the nation if you have a bunch of veterans complaining on how the government did not take care of them.
Where's the check on government waste for energy research? How do we know that we're actually getting anything of value from the money spent? Given past experience with the results of money spent on energy research I can't expect much if this continues. We haven't seen much success in the past, and a lot of failures.
If we are going to see government funded energy research then at least put the military in charge of it. I saw some awesome research on nuclear reactors, synthesized fuels, flexible solar panels, and more come from DOD projects. The problem comes when the Department of Energy takes over these projects. After that happens the goal becomes "foggy". In the DOD the goal is to make it fit in this, weigh less than that, and provide X amount of power. The DOE can't do such things because they have no end goal in mind. In fact the DOE has no reason to exist if they actually solve energy problems. So long as energy is considered scarce and expensive they can claim a need for funding, so they have a disincentive to solve anything.
The one well defined goal that they do have concerns the government nuclear weapons program. That should be a DOD program anyway. The Department of Energy needs to go away.
Sigh. Another GOP who has never served in the military.
Look, the military is about PROTECTION of America, and improving our defense. The highway system was built up to serve the military in times of war, while also helping our nation in a civilian fashion.
Energy is a SERIOUS issue for the military and our nation. As such, this R&D and even the subsidies to get this stuff going, IS about defense.
And as has been pointed out by the DOD, climate change, if it goes too far, will lead to massive numbers of wars and refugee issues.
Sadly, ppl like you are NOT listening to them because you AND YOUR FAMILY NEVER FUCKING SERVED.
You have NO idea of what it means to put it on the line. Nor do you have any idea of what it means to AVOID a war.
Far too many of you on the right, are like trump, cowards.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
Actually, economics, esp. manufacturing, is what enables a strong military.
WHen you do NOT have that, then any strong military is simply a drain on society. And right now, our mlitary is draining our GDP because of the idiots in CONgress.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
It is amazing how the far right really does not understand how important all of those items are. Even now, the military is pointing out how worthless our high school grads are. They are in HORRIBLE shape, and many of them can not pass boot camp or even pass high school.
Oddly, the GOP screams about having a strong defense, while gutting EVERYTHING needed to make it so.
The GOP is SOOOO fucking over America.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
"can't deduct the property tax on their big mansions" Sure they can! All they need to do is transfer the house into a pass-though trust, re-structure their actual income to go through several similar trusts, funnel income through various tax-avoidance systems in various islands, and a long list of other types of systems. "Normal people" don't have the wealth required to make use of this, but the 1% does. Raising taxes on them just makes them funnel even more money out of the "normal system".
The 99% and the 1% exist in two completely different economies, two completely different monetary systems. These wealth protection schemes cross several oceans, different countries, and are not designed for us peasantry.
Military spending is twice what it should be as a percentage of GDP - look at 1940 just before the war. Then shit got real and we spent 40% of GDP for WW2. Imagine what would happen if the US spent $7.89 trillion on war. That'd be a freakin' space opera.
A true "Bring Back the Good-Old Days" policy would cut DoD spending to $291.35B instead of increasing it to $639.1B - a $347B difference or 53% of the deficit. $650B in cost cutting or revenue increases needs to happen to stop the debt from growing. If each tax bracket was increased by 5%, the gap would be closed and the budget would be balanced. To actually pay the debt off, you'd need to raise 6.1 times current annual revenue in excess of spending. It can be done, but needs to be done as a 50 year plan to not wreck the economy. Politicians are incapable of long-term planning.
I'd like to see some examples of successful publicly funded research projects.
The irony of someone typing that on a computer, communicating over the world wide web on the internet is obviously completely lost.
I'd like to see some examples of successful publicly funded research projects.
The irony of someone typing that on a computer, communicating over the world wide web on the internet is obviously completely lost.
Not to mention the fact that some of those internet hops may very well occur via satellites.
If it weren't for deadlines, nothing would be late.
Aren't you happy?
*exact words
“He’s not deformed, he’s just drunk!”
I'd like to see some examples of successful publicly funded research projects.
The irony of someone typing that on a computer, communicating over the world wide web on the internet is obviously completely lost.
Not to mention the fact that some of those internet hops may very well occur via satellites.
He probably is pissed of that we have Government weather satellites, when the government should just get their weather form the Weather channel like the rest of us do.
The shepherds did so well protecting the flock that the sheep no longer believed that wolves existed.
Really? You saying all this time Obama was researching a lithium battery?
https://energy.gov/eere/vehicl... (Until some Trump lackey gets appointed to pull all the useful content off their website.)
Someone had to do it.
It's not *your* money, any more than the road you use is your road. It's our money. Your ability to earn money is inexorably linked to us pooling some percentage of it together for the common good, of which scientific progress is a part.
"Old man yells at systemd"
> The federal government has no business doing commercial product R&D that's actually being done in the private sector.
This is so wrong it's hard to know where to start. Let's just confine ourselves to renewable energy. It's fair to say that renewable is a growth market worldwide. If your country doesn't do fundamental research on renewables, how do you expect to capture this market? Well, it wont by slapping a 30% tariff on importing PV panels because the world's largest *market* for PV will retaliate in kind and you'll sell precisely 0.
Bottom line, if you're not in this race, you lose market share, and that means losing exports, jobs, tax revenue and all that jazz.
The second aspect of your rant is the whole small-government idea. Well, most of world considers that one of the things a government ought to do is ensure there is a healthy safe environment for their citizens. Any move to renewables is basically a strategy for avoiding chuffing out fine particles from chimney stacks and tail pipes. I mean, you wouldn't want to have everyone spewing out catalytic-free diesel clouds from their cars would you? Eventually, everyone is going to be driving (or being driven by) electric vehicles. That's just the way it's going to be. Most nations realise the value of investing in research so they can reap economic benefits from participating in the emergent industry.
Or you can basically kill all your environment protections, kill your research funding and initiate a trade war with everyone else by slapping on tariffs. It's a policy so perfectly honed to be almost completely the wrong-thing-to-do that it's breathtaking. Still, I'm sure your ideologues will convince you that it's good some how, the market will sort it all out right? Good luck with that.
Right, let's socialize the cost and privatize the profits.
That is not inherently bad. We subsidize the research, the company makes profits, and the public benefits from less CO2 emissions and a stronger dollar from fewer fossil fuel imports (or more FF exports). Win-win.
We can also take it further, and set up a patent-pool for all companies that accept research subsidies. This keeps the IP out of the hands of NPEs (who will just sit on them), while simultaneously encouraging companies to participate in creating shared IP. So we are encouraging both the creation and the sharing of innovation. Again: win-win.
The federal government has every business doing commercial product R&D that won't pay off in the short term, but that may very well reap huge benefits in the long term. When the average tenure of an S&P 500 CEO is only 10 years (https://www.creditdonkey.com/ceo-statistics.html), they have no interest in investing in technologies that may only pay off in 20, 30 or 50 years.
Unfortunately, that's exactly the kind of investment humanity needs right now....long term, speculative innovation.
Or we could just stick our head in the sands, say that black is white, coal is clean, news is fake and we've always been at war with eastasia. Maybe that will work out for us.
It is amazing how the far right really does not understand how important all of those items are. Even now, the military is pointing out how worthless our high school grads are. They are in HORRIBLE shape, and many of them can not pass boot camp or even pass high school.
Oddly, the GOP screams about having a strong defense, while gutting EVERYTHING needed to make it so.
The GOP is SOOOO fucking over America.
The left controls education in this country; the results of that system serve the goals of Democrats. Sure, you can point to some school in the rural south that is trying to teach young earth creationism, but the vast majority of schools are run by graduates of left-wing education schools (inside left-wing colleges) that are more interested in teach neo-marxist doctrine than the three 'R's', history, and physical education.
Further, they get their guidance from the United States Department of Education, whose employees gave $74,000 to Clinton last election.... and $220 to Trump.
SHRIEK and USE alternating CAPITALIZED letters all you care to, but the left owns education in this country.... so they own the results. It'll take another two generations to undo the damage your fellow ideologues did to American education.
Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms should be the name of a store, not a government agency.
It depends on what point on the curve you are at in terms of what the best investment is. Without the subsidies, the market would not have accelerated as quickly and profoundly as it did. Just 10 years ago, it was a really big deal to have a building with a 50kW PV array; the subsidies likely cut the time to get where we are now in half.
Personally, I think that has meaningful strategic value.
Remember when we used to be a first world country in the US, and poured resources into science and engineering and education so that we wouldn't fall behind the Commies? Today it seems like our competition is Syria, and as long as we're doing better than Syria that we don't need to work harder to be better.
This is like Biff from Back To The Future is president, and he gives noogies to any nerdy scientist he runs across.
Congratulations on your investment, Ivan! How are the capital gains tax is there in Russia?
It wasn't a hell hole back then. And the people were a lot better. And those people are the ones that made the social changes happen. It's been downhill the last 20 years. Your comment that "Of course it probably won't have any effect on industry...." is a great reason for a government with $20T in debt shouldn't be spending money there.
Once China finishes building their perimeter airbases on the various disputed islands, they will have air superiority over the big coastal cities. With their industrial and population centers defended the Chinese *will* be the strongest military power in the world.
In any protracted conflict, China's awesome industrial superiority will carry the day. We don't stand a chance against them in a long war. No one does.
THAT is the legacy of the Reagan / Clinton policy of deindustrialization. A few capitalists lined their pockets, and America was reduced to a second-rate power.
Vote Demonrat OR Repuglican for more of the same!
Public funding of research is a terrible idea. The decisions on who gets the money is decided by a bunch of lawyers in Congress based on how many votes it will buy them in their re-election campaign, not on it's ability to reduce pollution.
Whilst the size of the pot may be decided by Congress, a lot of the research goes on in universities, and allocation is via competitive tender, judged by a panel of senior academic peers.
You seem to suggest, no one would've researched those technologies, if the government hadn't done it.
That no one would have done the research eventually is probably unlikely, although hard to determine, but it is seems likely that such research would have been delayed, and less readily available to all companies in the field, so is likely to have reduced adoption. It's very hard to determine by how long a period without an alternative earth to test this on in detail, which does make fundamental research funding decisions difficult, but government has an opportunity to act like a VC firm, such that whilst not all investments necessarily pay off, it is highly likely that there is net benefit.
Almost all of the incremental improvements I've seen with solar panel technology have come from private industry doing their own in-house R&D so their specific brand of panel can outperform the competition in some way. It wasn't a matter of the U.S. government doing all that R&D and then sharing it with industries so we could have better panels for all.
Actually, there are a lot of universities in the USA doing research on solar panels, and then publishing the research (sharing it with industry). Private companies do research too, but it doesn't make sense to ignore the university research which is quite extensive.
You're thinking of Cambodia with the killing of eyeglass wearers, not China.
Reagan did his damnedest to destroy organized labor. And thereby eliminate the voice of working people in public policy discussions. Clinton oversaw economic policies under which large parts of our manufacturing infrastructure were literally packed into boxes and shipped to China.
Look guy, I work in government R&D. We do things inefficiently.
I work in private R&D. You have no idea the extent of inefficiency we are capable off, or the amount of politics involved in commercial products.
People who thinks that the private sector does things more efficiently than the government have no idea of what they are talking about.
The inefficiency associated with government doesn't come from the way it is funded but from the size of the organization.
Once a company is large enough to do the things the government is capable off the inefficiency and politics have taken over.
On top of that you have the blatant corruption.
In the government it is fought, in the private sector it is considered good business practice.
Even better is when you put a private company in charge of developing something with government funding.
Then it is not just the regular inefficiency and politics. Then you add a nice chunk of "milk the government" on top of it.
You start to do things inefficiently because it generates more profit.
I agree with a lot of what you say, but Clinton's policy and accord with china is not really what did that.
It was in 2005 that W passed the infamous tax law that says that those companies did not have to pay taxes until the money was repatriated. At that point, it was better for companies to keep it offshore and wait for idiots that would give major tax breaks on this rather than roll that back.
And to be fair, both O and Trump are disaster WRT China. O allowed China to constantly dump and did nothing about it. Trump's taxes are a joke. His effective rate for offshore repatriating is around 14%, while he is charging 21% for on-shore. At worst, those numbers should have been reversed, and the smart one would have been doing zero corporate taxes for America-made/serviced/sold, while the offshored businesses where charged 25%.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
it's science for defense and science for metrology standards.
The gov can and should do lots of things. For example, much of our vaccines and anti-biotics came from fed R*D, not from private businesses. The reason is that antibiotics solve issues and makes far far less money than drugs that simply gloss over recurring issues.
Our highway system was developed for the military, and that dictated our cars, in part.
DOT then does regulations because it is cheaper to have well made SAFE cars than to simply allow private businesses to decide. The pinto is a GREAT example of what happens when private businesses decide safety issues.
And no, we are not USSR. I know. I helped develop defense and weapons against them. BUT, just because we are not communist, does not mean that limited regulations are not needed.
BTW, that AC was not me.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
Have you noticed how your mom, sister, aunt, girlfriend, wife, daughter, and female friends haven't died from cervical cancer? You can thank public science (and NIH/NCI) for that.
Have you noticed how you haven't died from lung cancer yet? You can thank public science for that.
Have you noticed that things around you are made from plastic? Have you noticed that 'medicine' now involves surgeries and anti-bacterial treatments rather than voodoo and shrunk heads? Have you noticed how we can build rockets that take us into space, predict likelihood of certain diseases by reading an individual beings genome, troll unfortunates on the internet, scan individuals for relatedness, fly with the birds? Yes, publicly funded research has led to a vast improvement for our civilization.
I get the feeling your argument is more on the emotional axis than the logical one.
Those aren't scientists, however convenient for your argument that might have been.
So, in your own words, not spending 1.5 billion in tax payer money won't have "any effect", doesn't that imply that the spending was itself wasteful? If private interests will pick up the slack, shouldn't we be saving that money to spend somewhere else where it is more needed? Maybe that money could be spent improving infrastructure? Or other research? Or just plain not spending as much so our government doesn't have to borrow as much money every year. It doesn't sound so "retarded" to me in that light (and there's a bit of irony in an angry liberal using a derogatory word to describe mentally handicapped).
I agree with you about Trump's likely motivation here, but that doesn't mean that the outcome is actually bad. Don't go on angry rants about things that aren't really that bad -- it makes it much harder to take rants about actual bad things seriously.
"Save the whales, feed the hungry, free the mallocs" -- author unknown
Examples of government funded research that made it to private sector:
Cell phones
Radio
Internet
Electron Guns (tube TV's)
LCD displays
Lithium batteries
Just from NASA alone:
Barcodes
Cordless power tools
MRI Machines
Microchips & Integrated Circuits
Quartz clocks
Smoke Detectors
Teflon
Velcro
Infrared thermometers
Ventricular Assist devices (Devices that make heart transplants possible)
Artificial limbs
LEDs
Scratch resistant glass
Aircraft anti icing systems (IE what makes planes able to fly in winter and as high as they do)
Radial tires with a life over 2000 miles
Chemical leak detection systems
Fire breaks & Fire resistant building materials
pressurized Fire extinguishers
Memory foam
Cordless vacuums
Freeze dried foods
Digital cameras
I'm tired of typing, and I'm not even 3% through the list.
Taken as part of the social contract that is the United States citizenship under the United States Constitution as specified in Article 1 Section 8.
If you don't agree with the social contract that comes with being a citizen of this nation, you are free to move to a nation that has no social contract or taxes that come with it. I hear Somalia is nice this time of year, and it fits your demand nicely.
Hidden in the WaPo article is an (alleged source) punchline,
One source familiar with the negotiating process, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to freely describe what the person had learned, said that the budget request had been lowered after negotiations with the Office of Management and Budget, and may have been lowered further because of a desire to channel more funding toward nuclear energy, a favored subject for Energy Secretary Rick Perry.
It's funny that so many of the folks who see Russian Bots everywhere and also happen to promote utility wind and solar, FAIL to spot the 'natural gas bots' in their midst. If there is a future for modern civilization at the present level of convenience -- which is code for "nobody has to die" -- it is through clean, safe nuclear energy with a ~300 year low volume waste profile . See that link for more rant.
<blink>down the rabbit hole</blink>
Those times weren't even the "good old days", at least not for most people. Female, non-white, gay, transgender, disabled... Basically anything other than healthy straight white male sucked to be back then.
const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
No it's ours. Taken by mandate. Who would volunteer to pay it? Usually spent unwisely. Rarely for the common good. Usually to pander to some cause or make someone (or some group) feel good about themselves. What innovation comes from it we end up paying for again if we want to use it.
No, it's the Federal Reserve's. It says so right on the note. You and I are just borrowing it.
"What the American public doesn't know is what makes them the American public." -Ray Zalinsky (Tommy Boy)
Yup. Those coal mining jobs he was elected to bring back will be coming back any day now. Any day now.
Give the DOE 10% of the DOD budget and they could probably come up with "some awesome research" as well.
You also talk about "check(s) on government waste for energy research" but what about checks on waste in military spending?