Winners and losers for science in the US budget

Last week President Obama promised the science community that science was near the top of his agenda, with the stated goal of increasing science funding to 3% of GDP in a mixture of public and private funding (mostly private).

NSF

In the administration’s proposed 2010 budget that was released yesterday, the National Science Foundation receives an 8.5% increase to $7.04 billion on top of the stimulus money awarded in February. According to ScienceInsider , some of the new increase will go to expanding climate change research and supercomputing facilities, while $15 million will go toward three-year grant fellowships. Next week NSF will go into more detail over which programs expand, and which will be cut.

DOE

Science funding at the Department of Energy increases from $4.8 billion to $4.9 billion, excluding the $1.9 billion in additional stimulus funding that was awarded earlier this year. In a press conference DOE Energy Secretary Steven Chu highlighted in the budget $280 million to be spent on developing eight innovation centers that will each focus on a different type of energy technology, such as solar or carbon dioxide sequestration in a private-public partnership. Funding for the hydrogen-fuel vehicle development program will be cut from $169 million to $68 million. In the budget the Obama administration proposed $17 billion in cuts ; these include canceling the refurbishment of the linear accelerator at the Los Alamos Neutron Science Center, which was slated to cost $19 million.The National Nuclear Security Administration’s FY 2010 budget would increase by 8.9 percent to $9.9 billion. Funding for NNSA’s Weapons Activity program would remain flat, while the budgets for Defense Nuclear Nonproliferation and Naval Reactors would see significant increases [FYI report ].

NASA

Despite the fact that NASA still does not have a new administrator, NASA’s proposed $18.7 billion budget (a 5% increase over last year) does include extra funding for a flight to the International Space Station for the Alpha Magnetic Spectrometer. Funding the extra AMS flight has been controversial as NASA’s partners had spent $1.5 billion on the instrument before NASA announced it was canceling its launch five years ago. A successful lobbying campaign by project leader and Nobel Prize winner Sam Ting has now managed to get it back on the schedule. In a telephone press conference NASA space operations chief William Gerstenmaier said that the AMS flight is scheduled for 16 September 2010. Although NASA’s budget goes up, the science division sees a $26 million decline from the 2009 budget passed by Congress. However, because Congress frequently adds a number of substantial earmarks to the NASA budget, and the Obama adminstiration has stripped nearly all of them out for 2010, the funding decline is not as large as indicated. Moreover, the science division received an extra $400 million in stimulus funding earlier this year. The longer-term projections for the science budget indicate that funding should increase.

“Over those five years [2010-2015], we’re seeing an extra $1.2 billion over the budget we had last year. This increase is entirely in the earth science arena,” said NASA associate administrator Ed Weiler to reporters yesterday. Weiler is in charge of the science directorate. By 2013, for the first time, the earth science budget would be larger than the planetary budget. [see also FYI: NASA budget request ]

Department of Defense

The DoD has requested $1.8 billion for basic research, just over $100 million more than the 2009 request. The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency has asked for $3.2 billion, more than 4% what DARPA received in 2009 [see also FYI: DOD request ].

Research at other agencies

Funding for research at the Department of Homeland Security increases 4% to $968 million, with most of the increase going toward research in federal labs. At the Environmental Protection Agency, funding increases 6.8% to $842 million, spread more or less evenly over existing programs and upgrading existing facilities. The National Institutes of Health saw a 1.4% increase to $31 billion, excluding $10.4 billion in stimulus funding. The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration would rise from $4.4 billion to $4.5 billion, while the US Geological Survey would increase 5.2% ($54 million) to $1.1 billion [FYI report ]. NIST increases 3.3 percent to $846.1 million.

Paul Guinnessy