Congressional deal softens blow for science in Trump budget

The two-year budget pact signed into law by President Trump last week averted what would have otherwise been a repeat effort by the administration to gut the R&D programs of all the major nondefense scientific agencies. The sudden availability of $68 billion in new discretionary spending for fiscal year 2019 allowed the administration to recommend restoring the Office of Science of the Department of Energy, NSF, and the National Institutes of Health to their current-year levels. But other R&D programs remain targeted for big hits in the budget blueprint , which was released on 12 February.

The administration calls for DOE’s fossil energy, nuclear energy, electricity transmission, and energy efficiency and renewable energy programs to be cut by a collective $1.9 billion, to $2.5 billion. The Advanced Research Projects Agency–Energy, a small but impactful program that supports high-risk clean-energy technologies, is proposed for elimination, just as it was last year . NIST’s core laboratory programs would be reduced by 15%, and NOAA’s oceanic and atmospheric research program would be slashed by 37%. The Environmental Protection Agency’s science and technology program would plunge 36%.

Judging by its recent actions, Congress does not share the administration’s appetite for many of those cuts. Following two brief partial government shutdowns, lawmakers agreed last week to add $131 billion in new funding for nondefense discretionary programs this year and next, blowing past previously enacted spending caps. The budget deal also upped the limits on defense spending by $165 billion over the two years. The caps are top-line numbers, so House and Senate appropriators still must determine how to distribute the funding for the current fiscal year, which began in October.

The congressional budget deal came too late to be fully integrated into the Office of Management and Budget’s 2019 proposal, which was prepared weeks in advance. Instead, OMB director Mick Mulvaney produced a 26-page addendum letter that doles out tens of billions of supplemental dollars to federal agencies. The updated request has DOE, NSF, and NIH, which had faced cuts ranging from 22% to 31%, maintaining their FY 2019 funding at that of the current year’s latest continuing resolution, which is in turn even with that of FY 2017. NIH, which accounts for about half of all civilian federal R&D funding, had been slated for a $9 billion reduction before last week.

NASA’s science programs are pegged for a 3% funding increase, yet several missions and programs are in peril. The administration proposes to cancel the $3.2 billion Wide-Field Infrared Survey Telescope , the top-ranked mission in the 2010 astronomy and astrophysics decadal survey . The White House also wants to cease financial support of the International Space Station by 2025, with the goal of transferring responsibility to the private sector. And as it did last year, the administration calls for terminating five Earth science missions.

The budget requests for defense-related programs were not affected by the congressional agreement. The Defense Department’s request for basic and applied research is flat at $7.4 billion. The Pentagon’s advanced technology program would inch up 0.3%, to $6.3 billion.

The nuclear weapons science programs of DOE’s National Nuclear Security Administration would increase from $435 million to $565 million, but spending for inertial confinement fusion—a separate budget line—would decline by $100 million, to $419 million. The lion’s share of that money goes to the National Ignition Facility at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory.

The chart is courtesy of FYI , which reports on federal science policy with a focus on the physical sciences. Both FYI and Physics Today are published by the American Institute of Physics.