CONGRESS and President Bush spared scientific research in their eleventh-hour
deal last weekend to hack $40 billion from next year鈥檚 American budget deficit.
Congress must now settle the details, however, and some science will inevitably
suffer.
Automatic cuts of about one-third in all research programmes, which
would have been invoked if the two sides had failed to reach an agreement,
were avoided when new spending ceilings were accepted by the administration.
Congressional funding panels expect to receive new aggregate spending
goals this week. For domestic programmes, these will maintain current spending
levels, adjusted for inflation, over the next three years. Congress must
now match these targets with its own preliminary spending plans for each
government agency by 19 October.
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Some research projects have already felt the budget knife. For example,
the Senate鈥檚 spending panel has proposed cutting funds for NASA鈥檚 space
station by one-third and cancelling the US-German comet mission planned
for 1995, as well as work on a mission to the Moon and Mars.
Congress is already planning to raise funds for biomedical research.
The National Science Foundation has so far survived with its budget request
almost unscathed.