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As the pundits decry President Bush's latest deficit spending, the geosciences
have taken a hit.
Released on Monday, the administration's $2.4 trillion fiscal year 2005 budget
request to Congress was all about priorities. As outlined in his State of the
Union address, the president's top priorities are enhancing national security,
strengthening homeland defense and fostering economic recovery. The budget cuts
and increases also reflect a goal toward greater efficiency and productivity,
according to the Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP). Now, geologists
are quietly bemoaning the decreases, while at the same time noting the maintenance
and gain for some programs within the geologic purview.
The requested budget battered all scientific agencies, with the exception of
the Department of Energy. Secretary Spencer Abraham said his department made
the biggest budget request in its history, with modest increases in renewable
energy research and environmental management (largely for the establishment
of a permanent nuclear waste repository). The Department of the Interior (DOI)
on the whole received an increase in the president's requested budget, but the
U.S. Geological Survey (USGS) again faces some large cuts.
EPA has also taken a hit — losing about 7 percent of its actual budget
in this year's request. The Washington Post reports that the greatest
cuts to EPA funding were for building waste treatment plants and for drinking
water infrastructure. Requested funds for science and research at the EPA were
reduced by about $100 million, affecting research programs focusing on water
quality and climate change issues, among others.
Still, Marcus Peacock, Office of Management and Budget associate director for
natural resource, energy and science programs, said at a press conference Monday
that the president's budget request for research and development programs is
the highest since the Apollo space program in 1968. Although much of the research
and development funding will go to defense and homeland security projects, non-defense
research and development programs received an increase to the third highest
level in the last 25 years (5.7 percent of total discretionary outlays).
"The president's budget is supporting the technical community in the United
States," said John Marburger, the president's science advisor and director
of OSTP. "The administration is and has been highly favorable to research
and development." Scientists, he said, "are getting more done,"
and scientific productivity is higher than ever. A case in point is the National
Science Foundation (NSF), he said, and they will receive a budget increase this
year. The president's budget, Marburger and Peacock said, is awarding overall
excellence.
Chip Groat, USGS director, says that he does see progress in the president's
request itself. "We're being allowed to ask for more, though we got less,"
he says. Overall, the USGS budget resembles the initial administration request
from fiscal year 2003, which represents a loss of approximately $18 million
dollars from the money appropriated to the agency for the last fiscal year.
At Monday's budget conference for DOI, Secretary Gale Norton noted that such
a shortfall has in the past been made up by Congress during appropriations.
Over the past two years, for example, the USGS water resources programs have
seen significant losses in the president's requested budgets, but Congress has
restored the funding. "We don't see much change in that cycle: It gets
taken out every year, then Congress adds it back every year," Groat says.
Increases in the president's requested budget for USGS include $800,000 for
the InSAR (interferometric synthetic aperture radar) hazards monitoring of volcanoes
in the Hawaiian and the Aleutian islands. Also, the budget reflects an increased
allocation to the USGS water program to allow participation in the EPA Water
2025 program, an effort to alleviate a future national water crisis. The biological
survey also received some increases to investigate endangered species in the
Klamath River basin and Great Lakes freshwater ecosystems.
Groat also notes a small cut in the Toxic Substances Hydrology Program and more
significant cuts to the USGS minerals and geography and topographic mapping
programs. Most notably, the allocation for the minerals resources program of
the USGS decreased considerably, losing more than $6 million and an additional
$1 million shifted to the new Enterprise Information division of USGS. Enterprise
Information is pulling employees from every section of the survey to establish
centralized electronic data and other agency-wide measures.
Groat noted in a presentation after the DOI budget conference that inflation
and other unexpected costs mean that static budget allocations are actually
decreases as well. In an effort to remain "flexible" in hiring practices,
he said that USGS will stress contract work, post-doctoral appointments and
other non-permanent employment.
That kind of strategy has worked well for NSF in recent years, which will see
an increase again this year. "NSF has fared, relatively speaking, pretty
well," said Rita Colwell, director of NSF, at the NSF budget conference.
"It would be disingenuous to say this is all we had hoped for, but it is
pretty good considering the cuts in other programs."
NSF reports an increase of 3 percent this year over last year's allotment. Some
of the boost will go toward increasing of the number of graduate education fellowships
from 5,000 to 5,500. "Our number one priority is increasing the number
of young people" in science, Colwell said: Capturing the young talent is
vital to the next generation of discovery.
Indeed, NSF's science education and learning centers fared well, increasing
from last year's budget request, as did certain earth science related projects
including EarthScope, the Integrated Ocean Drilling Program and the National
Ecological Observatory Network. Overall, NSF's geosciences budget increased
by 2.2 percent. Colwell said she is excited about the great deal of work that
has been done in observations, and looks forward to seeing a global observatories
system. "It's ambitious, but fully doable," she said.
Additionally, Colwell said, NSF supports the president's objective of reducing
uncertainty in climate science. Marburger said that climate change initiatives
will be funded this year at the same rate as last year, but significant funding
will focus more on science, with reallocations of some funds from one agency
to another.
Naomi Lubick and Megan Sever
Links:
OSTP
Budget Information
USGS
Budget Information
DOI
Budget Information
DOE
Budget Information
EPA
Budget Information
"Security, defense top Bush budget
proposal," Geotimes, Feb. 4, 2003
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