These are dramatic times for news about the US HEP budget, with the FY2009, FY 2010 budgets and stimulus package all coming together at the same time. The final stimulus package was very favorable for DOE and NSF, providing an extra $1.6 billion for DOE science and $3 billion for NSF.
Today there’s a draft FY2009 budget out of Congress, news about it here from Adrian Cho at Science magazine. HEP at DOE was down in FY2008, at $721 million (after a $32 million supplemental appropriation). For FY2009, which is half over, the draft budget has $796 million. There should be stimulus package funding on top of that. A proposed FY2010 HEP budget is being presented to OMB this week, and the President’s FY2010 budget proposal to Congress should be released in April. In the same draft, NSF research will get an overall increase of $362 million to a total of $5.18 billion (see here).
Today HEPAP is meeting in Washington, with presentations starting to appear online here. There are no decisions yet about what the supplemental funds will be used for, but according to the slides the guiding principles are to accelerate ongoing construction projects and update labs, increase operations and support of experiments at user facilities like Fermilab, and fund “selected research programs”, minimizing commitments in out-years. A program to support graduate students and early career scientists is under discussion.
More from HEPAP and more details about the FY2009 budget should be available soon.
Update: An outline of the FY2010 budget proposal from the President is now available. The proposed NSF budget is $7.045 billion, an 8.5% increase from the recent FY2009 omnibus legislation. The $3 billion from the stimulus package is on top of this. No detailed numbers, but priorities listed include “substantial increases for NSF’s prestigious Graduate research Fellowship and Faculty Early Career Development programs.” and increased “support for promising, but exploratory and high-risk research proposals that could fundamentally alter our understanding of nature, revolutionize fields of science, and lead to radically new technologies.” Sounds kind of like FQXI….
Hi,
This might be irrelevant here. But the list of speakers for Strings 2009 is out on its website.