10 a.m. Monday, the 2011 US Federal Budget to be Released. (January 30, 2010)

At 2 am Tuesday, Australian Eastern Summer Time the US administration's 2011 budget will be promulgated. The journal Science presages the occasion with:

After a year in Washington, it's the first chance for President Barack Obama's team to show what it has accomplished. Among the key questions which will be answered are: What's the fate of research agencies in a relatively austere fiscal year? What's Obama's vision for manned space? And how will the Administration adjudicate the end of the troubled $15 billion National Polar-orbiting Operational Environmental Satellite System, which is supposed to provide weather and climate data for military and civilian weather forecasters and climate scientists. That program is expected to be split into two or more separate programs.

Meanwhile University of Maryland physicist professor emeritus and keeper of "What's New" Bob Park notes:

I usually count the number of times that the word "science" comes up in the State of the Union address. Some presidents avoid mentioning it at all, and others mention it only in connection with some wildly impractical scheme they have been sold like Star Wars or the hydrogen car. President Obama used the word "science" several times but there were no new plans.

You might think that with Australia's economy being in better shape than almost all other first world countries we might try to steal a march on our cohort and significantly improve our university sector as the seat of the nation's learning and research. Unfortunately that don't seem likely.