Cuts Loom for U.S. Science [View all]

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http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=cuts-loom-us-science

In an ordinary year, a flat budget for the US National Institutes of Health (NIH) would be considered dire news. This year, it is far from the worst possible outcome. Hanging over the effective decrease in support proposed by the House of Representatives last week is the ‘sequester’, a pre-programmed budget cut that research advocates say would starve US science-funding agencies.

A sharply divided Congress is showing few signs that it can defuse the situation before the self-imposed fiscal time bomb explodes, in less than six months’ time. And even if Congress does manage to introduce last-minute legislation, as many observers expect, the sequester will have cast a shadow over the contentious process of funding science in a time of fiscal constraints — and in an election year.

The sweeping cut, scheduled to take effect on 2 January, is a by-product of last year’s Budget Control Act, which requires law-makers to find ways to reduce the federal deficit (see Nature 476, 133-134; 2011). When a congressional committee failed in its remit to do just that last November, the clock began ticking towards an automatic cut that will claw the required amount from across the federal government, including all military and non-military spending that is not required by law. The precise amount to be cut depends on several variables, including tax revenue, but an estimate by the Congressional Budget Office puts it at 7.8% in 2013 for the non-military component.

“Nobody wants to see the sequester, because it’s a terrible budgetary tool,” says Mike Lubell, director of public affairs for the American Physical Society in Washington DC. “You don’t just take a meat axe and chop off one finger from every pair of hands.”