The U.S. Congress has finally gotten around to producing a budget for fiscal year 2005. Some information about the budget numbers for scientific research is available here and here.
The NSF budget for research and related activities is being cut by .7% from its FY 2004 level, the first such cut in many years. The other main part of the NSF budget, that devoted to education, is being cut even more. A few years ago Congress passed a bill that was supposed to double the NSF budget over several years, but that bill is now very much no longer operative. It’s not clear yet how physics and math specifically fare under this new budget, presumably we’ll find out in the next few days.
The bulk of particle physics funding comes from the DOE Office of Science, and there the budget situation is brighter, with an increase of 2.8% for FY 2005. Again, the details of exactly what is being funded and what isn’t should soon be available.
Update: More about the new NSF and DOE budgets can be found here and here.
[..from Sean Carroll. The following are excerpts from articles on the NSF budget, with emphasis added.]
June 5, 2002 — By an overwhelming vote of 397 to 25, the U.S. House of Representatives passed a bill that authorizes a $2.5 billion increase in the National Science Foundation (NSF) budget over the next three years. Under the legislation, the NSF budget would increase by 15 percent per year, from $4.8 billion in FY 2002 to $7.3 billion in FY 2005. The bill would put NSF on track to double its budget in five years. The NSF authorization bill, which is entitled the “Investing in America’s Future Act of 2002” (H.R. 4664), must still be considered by the Senate.
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December 3, 2004 — The Cost of Congressional Caprice (The New York Times)
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If only the bill were a mere laugh riot. But the truth is that the measure, cobbled together from 13 bills that Congress failed to weigh separately and thoughtfully, legislates the costs of next year’s government by blindfold and bludgeon.
Nowhere is this more graphic than in the shocking cut that Congress levied on the National Science Foundation, the research dynamo that does so much to feed the nation’s economic growth through breakthrough advances in science and technology. Its budget will be $105 million less than last year’s, even as lawmakers spared an estimated $15.8 billion for a record 11,772 pet projects. This binge of bipartisan pandering to voters includes such national priorities as renovating the Hot Springs bathhouses in Arkansas and bolstering the Paper Industry International Hall of Fame in Wisconsin.
The science cut may seem minor in the context of the foundation’s total, more than $5.4 billion. But it signals harsher times to come. For the past two years, a profligate Republican Congress has allowed the deficit to balloon by papering over such factors as the open-ended cost of the Iraq war and the revenues lost because of the Bush tax cuts. Now leaner, meaner government has become the rhetorical rage, with basic institutions like the Environmental Protection Agency and the affordable-housing program joining the science foundation in taking hits.
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The FY 2005 budget was already going to fall well short of the $7.3 billion that was authorized by the House (but evidently not passed) in 2002, without the cut relative to FY 2004. What’s up? From an interview one year ago:
Dear Hacik,
as you can see by looking at the words more carefully, “conservativism” is derived from the word “conservation”.
So energy conservation is a conservative value, much like PCs. 😉
Thanks for your understanding.
Lubos
Energy conservation is so PC and left wing Lubos, I’m surprised to hear you buying into it.
You cannot create energy because of a principle that is called the energy conservation law. 😉 You can only convert energy from a less useful form to a more useful form – and the energy that our experimental friends will use to initiate collisions that will lead to production of Kaluza-Klein modes – with energy escaping to extra dimensions – is certainly more useful energy than any energy that you’ve used in your life. 😉
If this scenario is correct, a couple of megajoules will be enough to create a Nobel prize. 😉
The DOE should get out of the particle physics business altogether. The purpose of the DOE is to create energy, not make it disappear into hidden dimensions.
It sounds kind of logical that the DOE funding is more stable in this situation because this department has a more “strategic” character. I would probably agree that the big budget deficit is not an ideal moment to increase funding of pure abstract science too much, and it would be nice if the deficits were reduced once again.
America spends too much – and the trade gap is very big, too. You, Americans, should reduce your eating of everything else from the world. 😉