Every year, not long after the state of the union address, the administration unveils its budget request to Congress. Then comes the long authorization and appropriations process; in an election year I'd bet that they try hard to have it done before November. The Obama administration's request came out yesterday, and so it's time to take a look at how science may fare next year. Jeffrey Mervis at ScienceInsider over at the AAAS has a nice article summarizing the general picture for science in the budget, including an 8% increase for the National Science Foundation and a smaller 3% boost to the National Institutes of Health. The Office of Science and Technology Policy (headed by the president's science advisor) has a set of fact sheets on science policy. Check out the one on doubling the science budget - the administration is on track for doing just that by 2017. Will Congress support that? But, being funded by it, I always start first with the DOE Office of Science. The DOE has a summary document with budget highlights; for the Office of Science the most succinct table shows the breakdown by program and year (click on it for a bigger version):
Overall, the OS is looking at a 4.4% increase over FY2009, not including the stimulus bump in 2009, listed in the column called "recovery". In a year when the administration wants to freeze discretionary spending, that is not bad for science. It's clearly coming from savings elsewhere, meaning someone's program got cut, and those people (and their congressional representatives) will be fighting like crazy to restore it. Within the OS there are winners and losers as well. Basic Energy Sciences, which covers a host of research in condensed matter including nanotechnology, materials, and multipurpose facilities such as the large light sources, gets the lion's share of the OS budget, and are slated for a 12% increase. I think this reflects the administration's desire to foster research in areas that could lead in the near to medium term to new sources of energy. That increase, though, along with increases for advanced computing and bio/environment research, has to come from the other programs in OS, and it appears that fusion energy (-10%) and a line titled "Congressionally Directed Projects" . Now what on earth is that? Now, I am not a Washington insider by any means, but I don't recall seeing that designation explicitly in the tables before. I believe, though, that it means projects funded through Congressional earmarks. Are all earmark-funded projects being killed? It certainly appears so... Within my own field the tea leaves say that the administration is requesting that the Tevatron remain in operation through 2011, support participation in the LHC and work on future upgrades to the experiments, and begin to develop the next big project at Fermilab, so-called "Project X" (which deserves a post all by itself some day). Project X will deliver an ultra-intense beam of protons for neutrino and rare decay experiments, including the Long Baseline Neutrino Experiment proposed for the Deep Underground Science and Engineering Laboratory (DUSEL) in the Homestake Mine in Lead, South Dakota. There is also a substantial appropriation for the Dark Energy Survey; Fermilab is building the camera. So begins the 2011 budget cycle.
