Bush Asks Congress to Double Science Spending
A Timely State of the Union Request
SOURCE: AP
Progressives can get behind the president if he supports in words and deeds his calls for a doubling of federal spending on critical basic research.
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Bush certainly got this right in his State of the Union presentation last night. “To keep America competitive into the future, we must trust in the skill of our scientists and engineers and empower them to pursue the breakthroughs of tomorrow,” the president said. “So I ask the Congress to double federal support for critical basic research in the physical sciences and ensure America remains the most dynamic nation on earth.”
If the president follows through on this request when he presents his Fiscal Year 2009 budget to Congress next week, then perhaps the president and Congress together can ensure that these appropriations actually happen. That’s a big if, as one of the Advisory Board members of Science Progress, Economic Policy Institute Research and Policy Director John Irons, noted in his recent column Science and the 2009 Budget.
Bush last night chose instead to blame Congress for past failures to fund basic science research adequately. “Last year, the Congress passed legislation supporting the American Competitiveness Initiative, but never followed through with the funding,” he said. “This funding is essential to keeping our scientific edge.”
He knows, of course, that budget battles between the White House and Congress often culminate with the least visible and more long-term funding proposals losing out to the more headline-grabbing, more immediate funding needs of the nation during the final push to passage. In the coming budget debates, both Congress and the president need to keep in mind that scientific inquiry is indeed an immediate need to keep our nation economically competitive and our society healthy, diverse, and dynamic.
The Center for American Progress last November published an in-depth report that, among other things, detailed the kind of federal funding of scientific research necessary to help our nation remain at the cutting edge of science and technology innovation. In the report, A National Innovation Agenda: Progressive Policies for Economic Growth and Opportunity through Science and Technology, Irons and co-author Tom Kalil examined the specific levels of funding necessary—levels that match what president Bush called for last night. Indeed, our report and specific data from the American Association for the Advancement of Science illustrate the level of funding necessary to remain competitive. Specifically:
The National Science Foundation
The final appropriation for NSF was $6 billion, “well short of earlier House, Senate, and requested appropriations for a 2 percent” increase, according to the AAAS. The budget for NSF should be increased by 10 percent per year for the next 10 years. This would also enable an expansion of NSF’s key educational programs, such as fellowships, graduate student training grants, and programs to improve K-12 math and science education.
National Institutes of Health
The NIH budget should be doubled over the next 10 years, providing for modest real growth above the rate of biomedical research inflation. Increased NIH funding would also allow us to take advantage of recent advances in areas such as genomics (the study of entire genetic sequences of an organism and the function of genes), nanotechnology, personalized medicine, and early detection of “biomarkers” that can predict the onset of cancer and other diseases. This year’s increase was a mere 0.9 percent.
The Department of Defense
To strengthen America’s technological edge, Congress and the Defense Department should reallocate the agency’s funding so as to increase support for basic and applied research by 10 percent per year over the next 10 years. In FY2008, the Congress is likely to provide roughly $6.6 billion for DOD’s support for basic and applied research.
The Department of Energy
The Department of Energy’s Office of Science budget should be doubled over the next 10 years. According to AAAS, the DOE Science budget for FY2008 is “$4.0 billion, a 4.6 percent increase, a loss of nearly half a billion from earlier congressional appropriations.” The DOE plays a critical role in supporting unique national user facilities such as Lawrence Berkeley National Lab’s Advanced Light Source, which produces x-rays that are 1 billion times brighter than the sun.
The National Institute of Standards and Technology
NIST’s internal budget should be doubled over the next 10 years, and AAAS reported gains of “4.7 percent to $514 million.” This will help NIST keep pace with our economy’s needs for increasingly sophisticated measurement technology. NIST also has a program called the Technology Investment Program (formerly known as the Advanced Technology Program), which provides cost-shared funding to industry for the development of high-risk technologies. Numerous evaluations have demonstrated the effectiveness.
Integrated Education Research Traineeships
Science Progress advisory board member Scott Page of the University of Michigan says that the National Science Foundation’s IGERT initiative, which funds Ph.D. students in novel, interdisciplinary programs, breaks through the current incentive structures of the modern academy, which reward progress within disciplines. Doubling the IGERT carrots can provide incentives for scholars to step out of the comfort of their home departments to work with interdisciplinary teams on critical basic research so key to our national economic competitiveness.
The president’s request to double federal funding for basic scientific research was perhaps necessarily short on details. Science Progress and the Center for American Progress have those details. Now it’s time for the president and Congress to act.
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