Dot Earth Blog: The Long Shadow of Sequester Cuts on U.S. Science Investment

11:44 a.m. | Chart Updated |
John Broder has reported that President Obama will today try to push forward with a State of the Union pledge:

With few options available for financing his clean-energy ambitions, President Obama on Friday will propose diverting $2 billion in revenue from federal oil and gas leases over the next decade to pay for research on advanced vehicles, White House officials said. [Read the rest]

The article notes this is seen by the White House as a way to sustain energy science and technology development even as the automatic spending cuts kick in under what?s being called sequestration ? a euphemism for forced cuts in all programs because of political deadlock over changes in taxes and entitlements.

The president is scheduled to announce the financing plan at the?Argonne National Laboratory?near Chicago, which received money in early stages of the stimulus spending during the recession for research aimed at improving vehicle batteries.

The laboratory?s director,?Eric D. Isaacs, co-authored an article in The Atlantic this week warning that the cuts would cancel all new research efforts at the lab for two years or more.

The piece includes this sobering line:

Less than one percent of the federal budget goes to fund basic science research ? $30.2 billion out of the total of $3.8 trillion President Obama requested in fiscal year 2012. By slashing that fraction even further, the government will achieve short-term savings in millions this year, but the resulting gaps in the innovation pipeline could cost billions of dollars and hurt the national economy for decades to come.

For much more, read ?Eroding Our Foundation: Sequestration, R&D, Innovation and U.S. Economic Growth,? by the Information Technology and Innovation Foundation.

It was clear long ago that the pulse of stimulus spending devoted to research was a blip. [See "Short-Termism and Energy Revolutions."] It?s clearer than ever now. America?s decades-long bi-partisan slumber party on basic research in sciences related to energy continues.

This is what that slumber party looks like as of the 2013 budget:

Resource: Click for background from the American Association for the Advancement of Science on the impact of cuts that would come with sequestration.

10:40 a.m. |Update

In an e-mail, Roger A. Pielke, Jr., of the University of Colorado pointed me to his critique of ?R and D mythology,? repeated in The Atlantic piece cited above, on the connection between research spending and economic growth.

Source: http://dotearth.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/03/15/the-long-shadow-of-budget-cuts-on-u-s-science-investment/?partner=rss&emc=rss

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