Obama's New Budget Boosts Basic Research

In addition to sacking NASA's plans to go to the Moon by 2020, the new budget proposal that the White House forwarded to the Congress also includes more funding for basic science. Despite the federal freeze that has been proposed on all non-defense discretionary spending, American science agencies and organizations would receive more money in 2011 than they did this year. Analysts say that the move is meant to again reaffirm the fact that science and technology are two of the main priorities for the administration, Chemistry World reports.

The US currently has a budget deficit of more than one trillion dollars, and Obama is planning the freeze in response to that. The President believes that hundreds of billions of dollars could be saved over the next decade through this measure. According to the budget draft released on February 1, non-defense research&development institutions would receive $3,7 billion more than they did in 2010, for a total of $66 billion alloted for science. This translates in a six-percent increase over a single year, which is a lot, experts say.

“Given the president's announcement last week that domestic discretionary funding would be frozen at FY10 levels, we are very heartened by the increased science and education funding levels provided,” Glenn Ruskin, an expert at the American Chemical Society (ACS), said in reply to the new budget. Unlike the law-regulated mandatory spending, discretionary spending is the subject of yearly negotiations between the Congress and the US President. Under the new proposal, the US National Science Foundation (NSF) would see its budget spike to $7.4 billion, an eight-percent increase from 2010. Future government plans for the Foundation include tripling the existing number of graduate research fellowships, to about 3,000 over the next three years.

In addition to the NSF, the Department of Energy's (DOE) Office of Science, and the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) would also receive more money, up to levels of $5.1 billion, and $709 million, respectively. “The president was able to find money for science in a very tight budget. It's hard to be disappointed,” the Director of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) R&D budget and policy program, Patrick Clemins, added.

Still, not everyone is pleased. One of the greatest losers in this budget are the US National Institutes of Health (NIH), which only received a budget of $32.1 billion, a $1-billion increase from FY2009. However, the Federation of American Societies for Experimental Biology (FASEB) had advocated for a 19-percent increase in funding. The scheduled rise only amounts to 3.2 percent. The FASEB wanted the extra money so as to be able to keep the momentum generated by the $10 billion the NIH received under the 2009 Recovery Act, which saw numerous researches spike, and many new possibilities emerging.

“We have generated this incredible capacity. There are great ideas out there and a lot of momentum, and we want to make sure that doesn't fall off the cliff,” FASEB representative Carrie Wolinetz shared. Analysts fear that such a low budget would make many lines of research unfeasible, and would also force many out of their jobs.