Science Community Lobbies for Balance in Bush Budget

You can't increase one piece of science in America in research and leave other kinds of research in the doldrums," Senator Pete Domenici (R-NM), chairman of the Senate Budget Committee, said at a hearing on 6 March, about a week after President Bush released his budget blueprint for fiscal year 2002. With the exceptions of medical and military research, the picture the "blueprint for new beginnings" paints for the sciences isn't pretty. The uneven spread has members of Congress circulating letters and the science community lobbying hard for balanced funding increases across the sciences.

The blueprint, which was released on 28 February, would give the National Institutes of Health $23.1 billion for FY 2002, a 13% increase, on track for doubling its budget in five years, by 2003. And the Department of Defense would get $310.5 billion, a 4.8% increase, with $20 billion over five years for R&D, much of that for a national missile defense program.

Other funding agencies, however, would see flat or even falling budgets. The Department of Energy would get $19 billion--$700 million or 3% less than in FY 2001. And the blueprint specifies roughly $600 million in new spending, including a 5% increase for stockpile stewardship, for overseeing the country's nuclear weapons. That would mean cutting $1.3 billion from other existing DOE programs. "The administration hopes to protect the Office of Science at the expense of energy conservation and renewables, but Congress may not go along," says Mike Lubell, head of public affairs at the American Physical Society. "The ugly specter of lab closures could arise once again."

NSF and NASA would get tiny increases of 1.3% to $4.5 billion and 2% to $14.5 billion, respectively. Bush's blueprint proposes expanding NSF's math and science education programs, which, while welcomed by the agency, would nevertheless strain funding for other activities. Several NASA programs would be canceled, including the Solar Probe and an already threatened mission to Pluto that scientists had hoped to revive, and funds would be redirected to propulsion technology, the Mars program, and Earth sciences programs. The blueprint also calls for assessing, by 1 September, the possibility of moving ground-based astronomy from NSF's auspices to NASA's.

The budget back-and-forth is off to a late start this year, what with a new administration and delays caused by the election mess in Florida last fall, and it's too early to tell how funding will shake out for FY 2002, which starts on 1 October. A lot depends on what happens with Bush's proposed $1.6 trillion tax cut. The detailed budget is expected in early April. But major changes are not expected in the broad outlines of Bush's blueprint.

"I am hoping we can improve the initial Figures for research. They're not cast in stone yet," says Congressman Vernon Ehlers (R-MI), one of two physicists in the House of Representatives. "NSF is not adequate, and I am worried about DOE. I will put in a lot of time and effort to make sure we get equitable funding across science. In past years, in spite of a sometimes dismal early outlook, it's come out pretty well."

Even before the blueprint was available, various consortia of science groups wrote to the president urging, for example, that funding for DOE's Office of Science and NSF go up by 15% each. And in an op-ed column in The New York Times on 9 March, D. Allan Bromley, a nuclear physicist at Yale University who served as President George H. W. Bush's science adviser, summed up: "Congress must increase the federal investment in science. No science, no surplus. It's that simple."

But with the president's clear priorities -- education, the military, health, and the tax cut--and no science adviser yet in place, says Bromley, "this year, more than most years, I have the feeling the budget will look like the administration's proposal." Last year's 9% across-the-board increase to science was an anomaly, he adds. "This year we are talking about at most an inflationary increase. . . . Nobody is against science and technology. They just don't realize how closely it is linked to the major thrusts of the new administration. We need to point that out." It may well be that scientific societies and others will find it difficult to make significant changes for 2002, Bromley adds. "We'll have to really focus on 2003."