Nature, Science foresee slightly deferred pain for federal science funding

Articles in the current issues of Nature and Science contemplate the possibilities for federal science funding over the next few years. Both agree that, as Nature‘s article puts it, “science agencies avoid immediate pain but could be devastated by automatic cuts in 2013.”

Both end by stipulating that the presidential election could change everything. Science reports that William Bonvillian of MIT’s federal relations office in Washington, DC, “thinks there are simply too many variables, including a presidential election, to even hazard a guess beyond 2012,” and conjectures that if “he’s right, the annual budget roller-coaster ride will become even bumpier for the U.S. scientific community.” Nature‘s piece ends by quoting April Burke, who heads “a science-lobbying firm” and believes that by late 2012 “there might be yet another reality.”

Concerning the perspective at present, though, Nature explains that the recent debt-ceiling deal “puts a day of reckoning on the horizon: 2 January 2013.” The outcome “depends partly on a special Joint Select Committee on Deficit Reduction,” Congress’s recently appointed bipartisan committee of 12 legislators charged with formulating a plan by 23 November.

Nature sees a worst case of “shuttered laboratories and mass lay-offs at universities.” It quotes Michael Lubell, director of public affairs for the American Physical Society, predicting the “extraordinary pain” that “will get worse in 2014" under such a scenerio. Nature perceives greater danger for NASA, NOAA, climate research and applied energy R&D than for basic research funded by NIH and NSF.

Both articles see possibilities for survival of the threatened James Webb Space Telescope. But Science declares that the “only sure bet is that the tortuous, two-step process to shrink the deficit by $2.1 trillion over the next decade will be a bonanza for lobbyists.” The article observes that the “bigger fight to watch” could “come over the deficit-trimming recommendations for 2013 and beyond” from the supercommittee. Science adds: “Many political observers are already predicting the panel won’t reach an agreement and that the automatic cuts, called sequestration, will kick in.”

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. His reports to AIP are published in ‘Science and the media.’ 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.