By Ivan Semeniuk, Meredith Wadman, Susan Young, Eric Hand, Eugenie Samuel Reich, and Richard Monastersky
From
Nature Magazine
“It’s not every day you have robots running through your house,”
Barack Obama quipped last week at the White House science fair, a
showcase for student exhibitors that also gave the US president a chance
to reiterate a favourite theme. Science and technology, he said, “is
what’s going to make a difference in this country, over the long haul”.
Obama would clearly like to see many more robots, as well
as researchers and engineers, running around in the future, a wish
reflected in his budget request for fiscal year 2013, released on 13
February. The document’s message is one of big ambitions with fewer
resources.
A year ago, Obama proposed bold increases for science
agencies, but a Congress intent on curbing government spending refused
to back many of them. This time, the White House has scaled back in
several areas but boosted overall funding for non-defence research and
development by 5%, pushing it up to US$64.9 billion.
“Overall, the budget sustains an upward trend,” says John Holdren,
director of the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy in
Washington DC. “Because of fiscal restraints, it’s not at the rate we
preferred.”
With an election coming this November, House Republicans
are unlikely to be generous with the president’s request. As in previous
years, Congress could delay action on the budget, especially if it
decides to wait for voters to weigh in on Obama’s presidency before
making its decision. And the spectre of a severe across-the-board cut
dangles over the government because of an act introduced last year that
aims to chop $1.2 trillion from spending, starting in January 2013.
Here is an overview of what the president’s request would mean in key science domains (see
‘Tough decisions’).
Biomedicine and public health
The National Institutes of Health (NIH) in Bethesda,
Maryland, by far the largest US research agency, sees its budget held
level at $30.7 billion — a far cry from the $1-billion increase Obama
proposed a year ago. Despite the ceiling, Lawrence Tabak, the NIH’s
principal deputy director, sees the budget as “continuing our priorities
in basic science”, and it allows the agency to boost the number of new
and competing grants it funds by 8%.
The newly launched National Center for Advancing
Translational Sciences (NCATS) in Bethesda will grow by 11%, to $639
million. Much of the rise goes to the Cures Acceleration Network, an
effort to spur development of badly needed medicines through bold,
multimillion-dollar grants. The programme’s allocation grows fivefold
next year, to $50 million.
Accomplishing all this within a flat budget requires cuts.
Losers include the National Children’s Study, a long-term study of
early influences on the health of more than a hundred thousand children,
which received $194 million in 2012, but has been cut by $29 million;
and the Institutional Development Award programme, aimed at developing
research infrastructure in rural and undeserved states, which loses
nearly $48 million.
To pinch the pennies that will make new grants possible,
the NIH plans to eliminate inflationary increases for some existing
grants, cut others by 1% and keep grants seeking renewal at current
levels. The agency predicts that these measures would boost the success
rate for grant applications, currently at a historic low of 18%, but
only to 19%.
The flat-lined budget has drawn bleak appraisals from NIH
advocates. “We are talking about a budget that is probably close to 20%
smaller than it was a decade ago, adjusted for inflation,” says David
Moore, senior director for government relations at the Association of
American Medical Colleges in Washington DC.
Jennifer Zeitzer, director of legislative relations at the
Federation of American Societies for Experimental Biology in Bethesda,
says that her organization will work with research champions to persuade
Congress to boost the allocation for the NIH. The president’s request,
she says, “is not what we need to take advantage of the scientific
opportunities that are before us”.
The outlook is even less favorable for the Centers for
Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) in Atlanta, Georgia, which has had
its budget cut by 12%, to make a total of 22% in cuts since 2010. Those
cuts are, in part, counterbalanced by bringing in funds from a
long-standing health-services evaluation fund and from the Prevention
and Public Health Fund, which is part of the health reform law that
Obama introduced in 2010.
The dependence on the Prevention and Public Health Fund
worries public-health advocates. Using the fund to patch holes in the
CDC’s budget is “troubling”, says Emily Holubowich, executive director
of the Coalition for Health Funding, based in Washington DC. “The future
of the fund is tenuous at best.”
Obama has also kept the budget mostly flat for the Food
and Drug Administration (FDA) in Silver Spring, Maryland. However, the
agency will receive a $583-million bolus from new industries, mainly
from food-registration and inspection fees and from makers of generic
drugs and biosimilars.
The FDA has already been criticized for becoming too
reliant on industry funding, but Margaret Hamburg, the FDA’s
commissioner, says that the fees are needed to ensure effective and
timely drug and device review. “There is a common good here,” she says.
Physical sciences
The White House continues to support a long-term doubling
of budgets for physical-science agencies, including the National Science
Foundation (NSF) in Arlington, Virginia; the Department of Energy’s
Office of Science in Washington DC; and the National Institute of
Standards and Technology (NIST) in Gaithersburg, Maryland. The doubling,
relative to 2006, is a goal of the America COMPETES Act, introduced
under former President George W. Bush that year, and signed into law in
2007. Congressional appropriators have, however, slowed the pace of
these agencies’ growth considerably since then (see
‘A long way to go’).
The budget also shifts funding towards the applied end of the
research spectrum, where advances should translate into economic gains
more quickly. It continues to fund I-Corps, a programme launched last
year that partners entrepreneurs with scientists seeking to test the
marketability of their research. And advanced manufacturing, which
supports industry by developing measurement capabilities and standards
to guide new product development, gets $149 million — money that NSF
director Subra Suresh says will help to stem a decline in US
manufacturing. “In times of constrained budgets, we need to be crystal
clear about why NSF matters,” Suresh says.
The NSF emerges as a clear winner in Obama’s request, with
a 5% boost to its bottom line. And one thing is very clear at the
agency: researchers pursuing interdisciplinary research will be
rewarded, with $63 million allocated to a programme that supports such
work.
The NIST also gets a large increase, much of which is
aimed at advanced manufacturing, including both a robotics programme and
a ‘materials genome’ initiative that aims to speed up the development
of new materials.
The Department of Energy’s Office of Science receives a
more modest rise, much of which goes to its national laboratories and
Energy Innovation Hubs. Several basic-research programmes are trimmed,
including nuclear physics and high-energy physics, a shift that is
consistent with the administration’s emphasis on applied research that
is most relevant to energy technology.
“Basic research is systematically down,” says Milind
Diwan, a physicist at Brookhaven National Laboratory in Upton, New York,
and co-spokesman for a planned particle physics experiment that
received a drop in funding. “Those of us in fundamental-research have to
live within those priorities.”
At NASA, the talk is of “tough but sustainable choices”
for an agency that would receive $17.7 billion in 2013, $59 million less
than in 2012. Its science budget drops by 3.2%, but planetary science
bears the brunt of that, with a cut of 21%. For years, NASA has been
pursuing plans with the European Space Agency for joint missions to Mars
in 2016 and 2018. But on Monday, NASA administrator Charles Bolden
pulled the plug. “We just cannot do another flagship right now,” he
said. Officials fear that the costs for these missions would spiral out
of control, as they have for the $8.8-billion James Webb Space
Telescope, a follow-on to the Hubble telescope that is slated for a 2018
launch.
The pinch will perhaps be felt most keenly at the Jet
Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) in Pasadena, California, the traditional
home of the Mars Exploration Program. Last year, the laboratory had to
lay off the equivalent of 246 full-time employees, reducing its staff to
5,047. When the $2.5-billion Mars Science Laboratory lands in August,
the JPL will have to quickly find new work for a few hundred employees
so the latest Mars cancellations make more lay-offs likely. “Our
expectation was that we’d have another mission to move these people on
to,” says Richard O’Toole, the JPL’s manager of legislative affairs. “We
definitely feel the pressure.”
Energy, Earth and environment
In Obama’s plan, spending on energy efficiency and
renewable energy rises by $457 million, to $2.3 billion, with the
largest increases targeting advanced manufacturing, and vehicle and
building technologies. These programmes, run by the Department of
Energy, are aimed at bolstering the competitiveness of industry. “Our
motto is ‘Invented in America, made in America, sold worldwide’,” says
energy secretary Steven Chu.
Included in the package are increases for research in
solar energy, bioenergy and fossil fuels, including $155 million for
carbon capture and storage systems. But there are reductions and shifts
as well: the budget for wind power remains unchanged but is allocated
mainly to offshore technologies. Spending on nuclear energy continues an
ongoing move toward small, modular reactors.
The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA)
in Washington DC receives a boost of 3%. That isn’t enough to offset
both inflation and rising salaries, but nonetheless protects a core
agency priority: a programme of polar-orbiting weather and environment
satellites that has been troubled by delays and cost overruns. Last
year, NOAA requested a hefty increase of $688 million to get the
programme back on track, but received just under two-thirds of that.
This year, the satellite programme is boosted by $169 million.
NOAA watchers looking for signs of the president’s
proposed reorganization of the Department of Commerce, which would move
NOAA from there to the Department of the Interior, found no trace of the
plan in the 2013 budget. The budget is also silent on another big
initiative, the creation of a climate service within NOAA.
In what could be a third straight year of declining
budgets for the US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) in Washington
DC, the agency’s funding has been slashed by 1%, to $8.3 billion, almost
$2 billion less than in 2010. Nonetheless, funding for initiatives that
target climate change and the environment rises slightly, to
$807 million, protecting core science and regulatory efforts. To
compensate, the White House has cut $359 million from a pair of
clean-water grant programmes. These programmes are popular in Congress,
and law-makers have reversed similar cuts in the past.
“They did a pretty good job in making sure we are not
hurting our environment and conservation programmes,” says Scott
Slesinger, legislative director at the Natural Resources Defense Council
in Washington DC. But Slesinger expects Congress to inflict further
cuts.
With a 3% rise for its overall budget, the US Geological
Survey (USGS) in Reston, Virginia, fares better than most
mission-oriented science agencies. The agency’s research and development
portfolio expands from $675.5 million to $726.5 million. Part of the
increase includes an extra $13 million for research on the effects of
hydraulic fracturing, the process used by the oil and gas industry to
squeeze hydrocarbons out of non-porous rock. The president has also
pumped an extra $10.3 million into natural-hazards work, including
$2.4 million for research on quick responses to earthquakes, volcanic
eruptions and landslides, and $1.6 million to study the risk of
earthquakes in the eastern United States, which was shaken by a
magnitude-5.8 tremor last August.
Daniel Sarewitz, a geoscientist and co-director of the
Consortium for Science, Policy and Outcomes at Arizona State University
in Tempe, supports the increase for the USGS. “The survey doesn’t get a
lot of attention, but it does things that are important for the nation
and it’s structured in ways that make its science very useful.”
Education
The administration has taken pains to advertise a
$3-billion effort to increase and strengthen the future US science and
technology workforce. For example, a combined expenditure of $135
million by the Department of Education and the NSF aims to boost the
number of science and mathematics teachers by 100,000 over the coming
decade. An even more ambitious effort allocates an additional $81
million to increasing the number of science graduates by one million —
roughly 30% more than there are today — over the same period. According
to Carl Wieman, associate director for science at the Office of Science
and Technology Policy, simply reducing the attrition of science majors,
which currently runs as high as 60%, could drive much of that increase.
Obama made a point of previewing both initiatives during
the White House science fair, telling students there, “You give me
confidence that America’s best days are still to come.” Now, as the
budget goes to Congress, the battle to support lofty goals with real
dollars begins a new round.
