News & Views item - July 2006

 

 

The 800 Pound Scientific Gorilla May be Beginning to Rouse Itself. (July 14, 2006)

    Jeffrey Mervis, Erik Stokstad, and Eli Kintisch from ScienceNow report that a panel of the powerful US Senate Appropriations Committee has recommended that research in the physical sciences, space, and  oceanographic research get hefty increases in funding.

 The United States Capitol: life support for US science?

 

They write, "As part of a $51 billion bill funding several federal agencies, the panel exceeded by $1 billion the Bush Administration's 2007 budget request for NASA and topped the president's proposal for the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) by $750 million. The legislators also embraced the administration's opening move in a 10-year doubling of research at the National Science Foundation (NSF) and the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST)."

 

Barry Toiv of the 62-member Association of American Universities commented, "This is a very good bill for university-based researchers. We are very pleased by what the president and Congress have done so far this year."

 

However, it has to be remembered that the mid-term federal elections are due in November and congressional lobbyists predict nothing much will happen until after they have run their course.

 

Eventually a joint Senate-House committee will thrash out a compromise bill (a sister version of which was passed last month by the House of Representatives. It stipulated a 7.9% overall increase for NSF, to $6.02 billion, and the 17% boost to NIST's laboratories, to $467 million, which matches what President George W. Bush requested as part of his American Competitiveness Initiative).

 

To single out some of the panel's views, while the "NSF increase, to a total of $6 billion in 2007, actually falls $19 million short of the requested $334 million boost to the agency's research activities that would start it on the doubling road, it was warned not to trim anything from five programs within its $4.6 billion research portfolio--the National Radio Astronomy Observatory, the National Nanotechnology Initiative, polar research, the plant genome project, and international activities. [On the other hand the] panel more than doubled the administration's $20 million requested increase for the $800-million education directorate, doling out an extra $21 million to help have-not states become more competitive in obtaining NSF grants and three programs to help minorities pursuing scientific and engineering careers."

 

From its viewpoint, the private sector had both good news and bad news. The panel's approval of a $762 million overall NIST budget "is great news," says David Peyton of the National Association of Manufacturers. On the other hand he and other business leaders called "regrettable" the panel's concurrence with the House to eliminate the Advanced Technology Program (ATP) that funds basic research by industry."

 

In any case the interested parties will just have to wait close to the end of the year before they'll know how they will fare.