Nature and Science seek bright spots for science in the 2013 budget
DOI: 10.1063/PT.4.0199
With a sort of measured but gloomy hopefulness, both Nature and Science this week have surveyed the outlook for science in the 2013 federal budget, and Nature‘s editors have offered thoughts about what it all means.
Nature‘s news report “ Obama shoots for science increase ” argues that President Obama “wants to make room for research to grow in 2013—but faces an uphill battle. “Science‘s similar article, “ Science spared brunt of ax in budget request ,” argues that the president, “faced with implacable Republican opposition to his economic policies,” has “sent Congress a clear message in the 2013 budget he submitted this week: Don’t cut research.”
An overview paragraph from Nature characterizes both articles’ outlooks:
A year ago, Obama proposed bold increases for science agencies, but a Congress intent on curbing government spending refused to back many of them. This time, the White House has scaled back in several areas but boosted overall funding for non-defence research and development by 5%, pushing it up to US$64.9 billion.
Following that theme, both news reports amount to annotated lists of brief summaries of wins and losses for science.
A tabulation in Nature notes for NASA that the James Webb Space Telescope is “still on track, but [the] future of Mars exploration [is] less certain.” Nature cites “bleak appraisals from NIH advocates,” sees a shift “towards the applied end of the research spectrum, where advances should translate into economic gains more quickly,” calls NSF “a clear winner . . . with a 5% boost to its bottom line,” and says that the trimming of nuclear physics and high-energy physics is “a shift that is consistent with the administration’s emphasis on applied research that is most relevant to energy technology.”
Nature quotes Milind Diwan, a physicist at Brookhaven National Laboratory: “Basic research is systematically down. Those of us in fundamental research have to live within those priorities.” The magazine notes that with “a 3% rise for its overall budget, the US Geological Survey . . . fares better than most mission-oriented science agencies” and that the “administration has taken pains to advertise a $3-billion effort to increase and strengthen the future US science and technology workforce.”
Science‘s report covers the same ground, but offers more about the raw politics:
[The] real fight will occur over whether the deficit can be shrunk through a combination of tax increases and spending cuts, as the White House and most Democrats propose, or by cuts alone, as most Republicans insist. With Republicans in control of the House of Representatives and Democrats leading the Senate, political observers say the chances of resolving that dispute before the November elections are slim to none.
Concerning the Office of Science and Technology Policy in the White House, a sidebar explains that congressional “Republicans don’t appear to be in any hurry to lift the penalty they have imposed on OSTP for ignoring a congressional mandate to cease collaborating with China.”
Science also offers this summary concerning particle accelerator laboratories:
DOE’s nuclear physics program would see its budget fall by 3.6%, and an atom smasher known as the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider at Brookhaven National Laboratory in Upton, New York, would run for only about 10 weeks—a third of its capacity. Similarly, the proposed budget provides $22 million for development of a new accelerator known as the Facility for Rare Isotope Beams at Michigan State University in East Lansing; university officials were expecting $55 million. Outside the science office, the budget of the 3-year-old Advanced Research Projects Agency–Energy would rise from $275 million to $350 million.
A Nature editorial headlined “ Tough choices ” sums things up by cautioning that scientists “must find ways to make more efficient use of funds—or politicians may do it for them.”
The editors see “plenty of good news.” They note that the “idea that science is a driver of prosperity is one of the few things on which the United States’ bitterly divided political parties still agree.” But they caution that things could “get even more drastic” and that the “harder the cuts bite, the more ... agencies will have to streamline their operations and merge or terminate programmes.” It’s possible to imagine, the editors say, seeing the sending of “all of the NSF’s science-education programmes to the Department of Education, or merging the DOE’s particle and nuclear physics research into the NSF.”
The editors declare that “the arithmetic of the deficit is unavoidable,” and then continue:
Individual researchers, scientific societies and science funding agencies can no longer afford to be purely reactive, responding to each cut as it comes along. They need to be part of the debate, thinking systematically about how programmes and even whole agencies could be restructured to make them more efficient at using the scarce funds available, and more effective at promoting the best science.
The editors close by urging scientists “to address the increasing demands from politicians and voters for evidence that fundamental research is useful” by finding “better ways to measure the effectiveness of the nation’s investments in science.” They warn that if scientists “don’t do it themselves, politicians and others who know much less about science may very well do it for them. And who knows where that would end.”
Steven T. Corneliussen, a media analyst for the American Institute of Physics, monitors three national newspapers, the weeklies Nature and Science, and occasionally other publications. He has published op-eds in the Washington Post and other newspapers, has written for NASA’s history program, and is a science writer at a particle-accelerator laboratory.