Nature examines instability in US federal science budgeting
DOI: 10.1063/PT.4.0135
In a November commentary in Nature, Barry Barish, director of the Global Design Effort for the International Linear Collider, called for new federal mechanisms to lend multiyear stability to US funding commitments in big international science projects. US hosting and leadership for colliders, telescope arrays, and space missions, Barish lamented, are ‘in decline.’
Now Nature is addressing stability in US science funding overall, by publishing a news story reporting on it and an editorial advocating more of it.
The news story emphasizes the funding-predictability theme from the new report Transformation and Opportunity: The Future of the U.S. Research Enterprise from PCAST, the President’s Council of Advisors on Science and Technology. That report’s cover letter, by cochairs John Holdren and Eric Lander, emphasizes three recommendations that ‘stand out in scope and importance.’ One is ‘that actions be taken...to increase the stability and predictability of Federal research funding.’
Nature‘s news story notes that ‘the European Commission and European Parliament are planning the next seven-year budget, and the German Research Foundation (DFG), for example, works with five-year guaranteed budgets.’ But it predicts that in the US, the funding-stability cause ‘clearly faces an uphill battle’ amid funding uncertainties.
Nature‘s editorial contrasts the US Superconducting Super Collider, canceled precipitously in 1993 after expenditure of nearly $2 billion, with the ‘stately funding stream’ that the Large Hadron Collider relied upon within a fixed five-year budget from CERN’s 20 member states. It highlights the PCAST report’s view and offers a concrete example of harm:
A report from a panel of US presidential science advisers ... points out this obvious difference: European funding is slow and steady, whereas US funding, disbursed by congressional appropriators on an annual basis, is fickle.
It is not just large facilities that struggle. The top-line budgets of US science agencies can vacillate in destructive ways. For instance, the doubling of the budgets at the National Institutes of Health (NIH) from 1998 to 2003 induced many universities to open departments, take on postdoctoral students and construct new buildings. When the cash from the NIH suddenly dried up, the biomedical boomtown went bust.
Stipulating the reality that US appropriators ‘in Congress are unlikely ever to commit to multi-year budgets,’ the editors suggest that ‘science agencies should start planning budgets into the future, even though appropriators might well ignore them.’ And observing that appropriators gave NSF only $7 billion after reauthorization called for $7.8 billion, the editors suggest that appropriators should ‘match the funding levels set by authorization committees more closely.’
The editors sum up on a positive note:
The US way of doing things is not all wrong. There can be some advantages: an agency can pick up on a new scientific idea, propose a visionary programme and get it funded all in the space of a year—something that rarely happens in Europe, where some programmes end up being supported way past their prime. But when it comes to funding science, predictability is more of a virtue than speed, and stability better than surprise. The US scientific enterprise, dynamic as it is, could benefit if its budgets became a little more plodding.
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.