President Bush's budget request for next year has been released. Surprising approximately no-one who has followed current events over the last seven years, it's a mixed bag for science:
President Bush rolled out a 2008 spending plan Monday that disappointed advocates for scientific research, even as it called for hefty increases for several key programs in the physical sciences aimed at continuing the president's drive to double such spending. While they applaud that goal, academic leaders are troubled by the fact that the administration's budget plan, if adopted, would result in a reduction in funds for the National Institutes of Health, in relation to the months-late 2007 budget that Congress is on the verge of adopting.
[Y]eah, "double the federal commitment to the most critical basic research programs in the physical sciences over the next 10 years" sounds great. So does "If we reverse the polarity on the flux capacitor, we can generate an infinite amount of free energy, and a pony." I'll believe it when I see the pony.
Apparently, it's not so much a pony as a pug dog with a saddle.
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So NSF and many other orgs are getting big raises -- undisputed.
The president proposes NIH gets one of those "cuts" which is actually a raise of $0.2 billion over previous year budget ~$28 billion. But current budget coming through the legislature will give budget ~$0.5 billion than the president. Compromise likely to occur.
In any case, cry me a Susquehanna for science. Funding is still high.
Uncle Al spent a summer at NIH/National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute as a Technical Information Specialist. NIH is NASA without robotic probes. NIH is an inefficient bonfire of burning money. It in all its parts grows, invasively erodes, and metastasizes. As with any cancerous tumor, the first step in managing NIH is to minimize its remnant size.
NASA is getting a 1% raise, so science is getting a 1% raise. Yea!!! It could have been so much worse.
Bear in mind that a lot of what these agencies pay for is labor, and that the cost of living goes up something like 3% annually. A 1% raise in FY08 dollars is really a 2% cut in terms of personnel support. For example, the NSF CAREER young investigator program gives out 5 year grants worth about $100K per year. That amount has been unchanged for over 10 years. Now those awards, which are supposed to be foundational grants that let you establish a research program, pay for about one grad student. I'm grateful to have it, but the days when a CAREER grant really set up your career are gone.
Upstate NY, the NSF annual budget is about $5.5B. The NIH annual budget is about $27B. The DOE research budget is about $10B, and the whole NASA budget is about $15B. The GDP of the US is $13T annually. Compared to China, for example, we're spending far less on science as a percentage of GDP. In fact, funding for basic science research as a percentage of GDP in real dollars has decreased essentially continuously since right after WWII (with a big blip for Apollo, though that's long since died away, and we're right back to the trend line). While that's been going on, industrially funded basic research has pretty much gone extinct in the US. Given how much our growing GDP has been because of technological advances enabled by basic science and engineering research, this trend is not too reassuring. If you want real data, go take a look at the Gathering Storm report:
http://books.nap.edu/openbook.php?record_id=11463&page=R1
It's free from the National Academies press.
Doug: "Compared to China, for example, we're spending far less on science as a percentage of GDP."
These numbers can be misleading. Many people point to K-12 math and science education as an area on which we must focus to stay globally competitve in science. In fact, the report that you cited lists K-12 as the first priority. Nearly all K-12 math and science funding is done through local and state channels. Accordingly, this money is not included in the federal budget. If this was included, I would guess that we spend a larger percent of our combined budgets on "science".
Of course, this brings up the question of how we spend our K-12 math and science education budget. I think we would be better served by increasing funding for gifted and talented math and science programs (I'm not trying to recycle the Murray discussion here). I think this is where China roughs us up a bit in the sciences...they are willing to differentiate curriculum for groups of students.
For what it is worth, I work on a K-12 math and science program funded by NSF. I am disgusted by the financial waste that I see at the federal level on a daily basis.
Doug (#4),
The "Gathering Storm" report you links to notes (on p.63) that the US R&D investment as a fraction of GDP was (in 2000) 2.72%, with Japan at 2.98%, Germany at 2.49%, and the UK at 1.85%.
This page, which seems to be some kind of Chinese government puff piece -- and thus is likely to, if anything, overestimate things -- says the 2004 Chinese rate was 1.23% (which they admit is "far below the standard of developed nations"); they hope to increase this to 2% by 2010.