White House budget plan would slash science
Fiscal 2018 proposal calls for deep cuts in spending for EPA, NIH and other agencies
BY
SCIENCE NEWS STAFF
5:52PM, MARCH 16, 2017
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SHOW ME THE MONEY President Donald Trump has released his budget request for fiscal year 2018. It includes deep cuts to some federal science agencies including the Environmental Protection Agency and the National Institutes of Health, but other agencies, such as NASA, emerge relatively unscathed.
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Huge cuts could be in store for federal science spending if President Donald Trump’s vision for fiscal year 2018 becomes reality.
Although details are skimpy, Trump’s $1.15 trillion
budget proposal, released March 16, would make national security the top priority. The budget blueprint calls for a $54 billion increase in defense spending for 2018, offset by an equally big reduction in nondefense activities. Among the biggest science losers are the Environmental Protection Agency, which could see its budget shrink by 31 percent compared with 2017, and the National Institutes of Health, which faces an 18 percent spending slash. The Department of Energy’s Office of Science could lose about 17 percent of its funding while DOE’s Advanced Research Projects Agency-Energy, or ARPA-E — which supports research on promising energy technologies — faces complete elimination.
The bare-bones budget blueprint leaves out figures altogether for many science-related agencies. It doesn’t even mention, for example, the National Science Foundation, a major source of federal funding for basic research across scientific disciplines. NSF is currently operating on a $7.5 billion budget. Full breaksdowns aren't available for most departments, so there's no information on what's to come for such programs as the National Institute of Standards and Technology (part of the Department of Commerce), the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service (part of the Department of the Interior) and the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, or DARPA (part of the Department of Defense). More details for these and other omitted agencies may be included in a full budget proposal that the White House expects to release in May.
The White House’s budget outline is already raising alarm in the scientific community. “Major national goals are served by these investments in science and technology,” says Matt Hourihan, director of the R&D Budget and Policy Program at the American Association for the Advancement of Science in Washington, D.C. The proposed cuts, he says, “would set back our scientific leadership and would set back our technologies.”
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Proposed 2018 budget
Here are the president's proposed FY2018 budgets for select science agencies in $ billions. Numbers are not adjusted for inflation, which is predicted to be 2 percent in 2018.
Agency 2017
(continuing resolution) 2018
(president's request) Change
(2017 to 2018)
NASA 19.2 19.1 -1%
NIH 31.7 25.9 -18%
EPA 8.2 5.7 -31%
DOE Office of Science 5.3 4.4* -17%
*Estimate based on reported $900 million cut.
Ultimate authority of the budget rests with Congress. Last year, Congress failed to reach agreements on fiscal 2017 spending; the government has been operating under a continuing resolution that has largely kept agencies funded at their 2016 levels. That resolution expires April 28. But if the House and Senate can find common ground for fiscal 2018, which begins October 1, they are likely to be kinder to science than Trump was, Hourihan predicts. “Overall, Congress tends to find ways to support science and technology.”
Leland Cogliani, a lobbying consultant with Lewis-Burke Associates LLC in Washington, D.C., who specializes in DOE policy, agrees. “There’s a lot of angst and concern and worry about these proposed cuts to federal agencies as a whole,” he says. “My discussions with appropriators is that this budget is dead on arrival.” —
Erin Wayman, with additional reporting from SN writers