Obama discusses sequester and energy research at Argonne National Laboratory

Science : President Obama visited the Department of Energy’s Argonne National Laboratory in Illinois to discuss a plan for funding energy and technology research. Over the next 10 years, he plans to allocate to federal research about $2 billion of the revenues from the government’s offshore-oil leasing program. Obama’s plan, called the Energy Security Trust , will take advantage of the expected increase in what is already a $10-billion-per-year government revenue source. That additional funding may help offset any long-term damage brought on by the recent US budget sequestration. Unless Congress modifies the impact of the law that put sequestration into place, federal research budgets will be cut by 5% across the board on 30 September, the end of the fiscal year. Matthew Howard, a spokesman for Argonne, said that the laboratory is concerned with its ability to fund research in the long term. Because it is the site of DOE’s Joint Center for Energy Storage Research , which focuses on the development of new battery technologies, Argonne should get some funding from the new plan.