1.
OBAMA SCIENCE ADVISER WARNS CHINA COULD SURPASS U.S.
By Beige Luciano-Adams
Pasadena (CA) Star-News
April 21, 2011
http://www.pasadenastarnews.com/ci_17901812
PASADENA -- President Obama's top science adviser warned a gathering at Caltech that tighter budgets for scientific research could give China an edge in developing emerging technologies.
In a wide-ranging speech at Caltech on Tuesday night, John Holdren, who heads the White House Office of Science and Technology, also talked about the hydra-headed challenge of energy and climate change.
"I think what people need to keep in mind is that science, technology, and innovation have been the main driving force of our economy for decades," Holdren said in an interview before his hour-long lecture. "They're a major source of our security, jobs, economic growth -- and if you stop investing in these drivers . . . we will pay for it down the road."
Paying for it could include giving up our lead to China -- soon. The emerging superpower is investing heavily in areas Caltech is known for: nanotechnology, biotechnology, info-technology, and energy technology, he said.
"It would certainly be possible for the U.S. to be overtaken as a leader in these domains. If we don't invest and China does, then certainly, we could be passed in some of these domains in five or ten years."
International collaboration on science and technology -- sure to be first on the chopping block in the next budget -- will also suffer without proper investment, Holdren said.
The president's science and tech czar was upbeat about the fact that his sector largely dodged the knife in this year's budget deal.
"Science and technology fared better in the Continuing Act on Appropriations than most other domains of federal spending did," Holdren added.
But, he added, "I don't want to be too sanguine. What we've already seen . . . is some significant cuts to a number of agencies."
The Environmental Protection Agency, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, and the U.S. Geological Survey have all suffered serious cuts, while the National Institute of Health and the Department of Energy fared better overall, Holdren said.
And while NASA funding is down only slightly, the issue is more about distribution and a lack of required increases for important, expensive projects, he explained.
Earlier this year, amid budget uncertainties, NASA announced it would lay off more than 200 employees at its Jet Propulsion Laboratory in La Canada Flintridge.
With NOAA hit hard in the 2011 budget, Holdren also pointed to the looming 18-month gap in coverage by the government's polar orbiting satellites that allow scientists to track hurricanes and forecast weather.
"It really depends on how far past their expected lifetime the satellites last," Holdren said, "but there certainly could be a gap . . . It's important both to the civilian sector and to the military, and it affects climate studies -- and they're all at risk if we can't maintain the continuity of those satellites."
But while there will be fewer federal grants going out this year, Caltech, Holdren said, should not immediately suffer in a tighter budget climate.
"I don't see big impacts in a place like Caltech -- a place like Caltech is not going to be the first place to suffer in any case because the quality is so high and the reputation is so great, that Caltech investigators are going to continue to get grants in the national competition," he said.
"But there will be places that would've gotten grants under the budget we wanted that won't get grants under these new budgets," he added.
Holdren expects 2012 budget negotiations around science to be challenging.
Regarding the contentious debate over funding for climate and energy sciences, Holdren described climate as the critical "envelope" housing all other environmental processes and conditions.
"If you distort that envelope too much, you put at risk everything that's in it," he said.
"And we're talking about floods, storms, droughts, fires, rising sea level, many different consequences of disruption of climate by greenhouse gasses that we need to understand better -- not simply to motivate more action to mitigate climate change, but to take actions to adapt, to reduce damages we can no longer avoid."
Edward McCullough, a retired Boeing scientist, who drove from Riverside to attend the event, said he thinks Holdren's work in the White House is "just first rate," and found the discussion interesting -- but not enough.
"We have a major energy crisis, and we're not at the point politically where they're going to actually solve the problem," McCullough said.
With Japan on everyone's mind, Holdren said the U.S. would be taking note of a few lessons -- including the need to pay closer attention to how it manages its spent fuel pools at nuclear sites.
Against slides of President Obama spending extra time with young science fair and math competition winners, Holdren also emphasized the administration's continued focus on science, technology, engineering, and math education as a way forward.
Obama, he pointed out, has put more science and engineering stars in prominent leadership positions than any other president -- including five Nobel laureates as presidential appointees.
Caltech and JPL offered a token of their affection for Holdren: his own asteroid.
The naming of Asteroid Holdren, a "small, symbolic gift," Caltech professor, presidential envoy, and Nobel laureate Ahmed Zewail said, "I think will keep the bonding between you and Caltech and JPL forever."
The move elicited broad laughter from the audience -- some of whom might remember Holdren's ten-page letter to Congress last year about the need to ready U.S. defenses against the remote threat of near earth objects.
Presented with his namesake Tuesday night, Holdren laughed, "I hope it's not on a collision course."
This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it
626-578-6300, ext. 4444
2.
U.S. funding
HOW SCIENCE ELUDED THE BUDGET AXE -- THIS TIME
By Jeffrey Mervis
Science
April 22, 2011
http://www.sciencemag.org/content/332/6028/407.summary
When details of the 11th-hour budget compromise that kept the U.S. government running emerged last week, it became clear that science programs fared relatively well. True, most research agencies will have less to spend this year than they did in 2010, and the totals generally fall well short of what President Barack Obama had requested when he submitted his 2011 budget 14 months ago. But the legislators and Administration officials who struck the spending deal managed to slice $38.5 billion from a total discretionary budget of $1.09 trillion without crippling research activities.
3.
National
BUDGET FIGHT CLOUDS SCIENCE, TECH RESEARCH PLANS
By Ben Wolfgang
** Lack of funding 'assurances' seen as hindering innovation **
Washington Times
April 19, 2011
http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2011/apr/19/budget-fight-clouds-science-tech-research-plans/
With Democrats and Republicans still far apart on how to deal with the nation’s debt and fiscal woes, a cloud of uncertainty has settled over the nation’s scientific and technology research sectors over the size of their own budgets in the years to come.
While funding cuts would hurt, analysts think the lack of clarity poses its own danger.
“When you have contentious budget [debates] . . . it really affects how you plan for the future,” said Patrick Clemins, director of the research-and-development budget and policy program at the American Association for the Advancement of Science.
Mary Woolley, president and CEO of the nonprofit medical and health research advocacy group Research America, said scientists and innovators need “some kind of assurance that the nation is behind them,” and such assurances can be hard to find when billions of dollars in cuts are on the table.
“If they don’t feel [they’re getting that assurance], they’ll go somewhere else, and there are plenty of places for them to go,” she said Monday.
Laying out his plan to curb spending and reduce the national debt, President Obama last week again stressed that the United States must continue to lead the way on innovation. His initial fiscal year 2012 spending proposal, for example, proposed a 13 percent increase in funding to the National Science Foundation, boosting its budget to $7.8 billion.
The GOP’s 2012 plan, put forward by House Budget Committee Chairman Rep. Paul Ryan, Wisconsin Republican, proposes reductions in science, space, and technology, capping federal spending in those areas at $27 billion in 2012 and keeping it there annually through 2017. It is unclear which programs would be affected if the plan were enacted. A spokesman for the committee said Monday those details would be hashed out later, if the plan becomes law.
But neither side will get all it wants. Mr. Obama’s desire to boost funding to research and development is likely dead on arrival in the Republican-led House.
The White House, however, maintains the nation can’t sacrifice investments in science and technology, boiling the fight down to what Mr. Clemins called “an ideological argument” over “the role of government in science.”
As that argument continues, Ms. Woolley said, more people are becoming convinced the United States is “losing ground” to other countries, such as China.
“That clearly has an effect on young scientists and entrepreneurs,” she said. “At this juncture, it’s especially challenging to keep our country competitive in a world that has learned from us.”
Despite the ongoing debate, Ms. Woolley said, she doesn’t see science and technology funding on the “front lines” of the budget battle, simply because cutting a few billion dollars won’t be nearly as effective as implementing entitlement reform and other measures.
The 2011 spending deal took the first shots at funding for scientific research. The National Science Foundation, for example, saw a cut of about $53 million from 2010 levels. The cut eliminates NSF backing for about 1,500 scientific researchers and means 134 fewer grants can be awarded, according to Maria Zacharias, NSF’s acting group leader for media and public information.
4.
U.S. BUDGET A TASTE OF BATTLES TO COME
By Eugenie Samuel Reich, Ivan Semeniuk, Jeff Tolleson, and Meredith Wadman
Nature News
April 19, 2011
http://www.nature.com/news/2011/110419/full/472267a.html
Rush Holt calls it "deficit attention disorder." Speaking earlier this month at a science-policy luncheon on Capitol Hill, the New Jersey Democratic congressman and nuclear physicist was reflecting on the fiscal climate that has settled over Washington, D.C. Last week, the impact of that climate was felt acutely, as Congress passed a federal spending bill that makes the deepest cut ever to the U.S. budget. For scientists employed or supported by government research agencies, the news would seem to be dire. The deal, which President Barack Obama signed into law on 15 April, applies the first significant funding cuts to most of those agencies in a generation -- with the strong possibility of deeper cuts to come. Yet, given what might have been, the outcome is a relief to most research advocates.
"The basic-research agencies all did pretty well," says Patrick Clemins, director of the research-and-development budget and policy program at the American Association for the Advancement of Science in Washington, D.C.
Back in February, the Republican-led House of Representatives proposed a budget that would have ripped billions of dollars from the science agencies. That would have left the agencies not only well below the funding levels specified by Obama when he tabled his budget request more than a year ago, but also well below the 2010 levels they have been operating under since October.
The deal restores the bulk of those lost billions. Most science agencies now face cuts of about 1% (see 'Splitting the difference'). That is a reassuringly small portion of the US$38.5 billion, or 5.8%, cut from the 2010 allocation for non-military discretionary spending from which most academic research is funded. "In the end," says Barry Toiv of the Association of American Universities in Washington, D.C., "it is clear they decided that while it was important to cut federal spending they would continue to prioritize research and education."
Nevertheless, the fractious debate that has enveloped Congress for the past six and a half months foreshadows a much tougher battle over the 2012 budget. Although Obama has called for investments in science and technology to "win the future," Republicans have vowed to fight for deep cuts to reduce the escalating deficit without resorting to tax hikes. The remainder of the 2011 fiscal year -- around five and a half months -- therefore offers science agencies a short window of stability in which to take stock and prepare for renewed turmoil.
BASIC RESEARCH
Although few agencies would call themselves "winners" in the new budget, the sense of a narrow escape must have been palpable at the Department of Energy's Office of Science. Best known for funding high-energy and nuclear physics, the office had been targeted for an 18% cut relative to 2010 by House Republicans, a measure that would have meant thousands of lay-offs at national labs. In the end, the office came out of the deal with a cut of just over 2.1%. "It's a reasonable budget," says Pier Oddone, director of Fermilab in Batavia, Illinois. Oddone says that if the cut is applied evenly to all of the Office of Science's funding, Fermilab should still be able to continue to run its particle accelerator, the Tevatron, until the end of this year.
Last week the White House conceded in a statement that the promised 10-year budget doubling for the physical sciences would probably not materialize. The America COMPETES Act, re-authorized last December, had called for the boost, relative to 2007 baselines, for the Office of Science, the National Science Foundation (NSF), and the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST). Investment would still be "strong," it said.
Anita Jones, a computer scientist at the University of Virginia in Charlottesville, is unconvinced. Jones, who served on the National Academy of Sciences panel that called for the budget doubling in the influential report *Rising Above the Gathering Storm*, says that with the current budget, "Americans will cede the discovery of new 'innovation territories' to other nations."
On the surface, the NIST seems to have been hit hard, with a 12.5% cut relative to 2010 levels. But its Scientific and Technical Research and Services, the account that covers the agency's labs, was reduced by just 1.4%. The remaining cuts will be made in extramural research, development, and construction. "I'd say the feeling is a mixture of relief that the NIST labs escaped larger cuts hitting other parts of the government, and disappointment that the increases promised by the America COMPETES act have failed to materialize," says one NIST scientist who is not authorized to speak on policy.
BIOMEDICAL RESEARCH
At the National Institutes of Health (NIH), a cut of just over 1% amounts to a loss of $323 million, including $50 million that Congress has specified will come out of funding for buildings and facilities on the agency's campus in Bethesda, Maryland. The rest will be distributed proportionately across the NIH's 27 institutes and centers, and the office of the director.
"The bottom line for the NIH is: it could have been worse," says Jennifer Zeitzer, the director of legislative relations at the Federation of American Societies for Experimental Biology in Bethesda, Maryland.
A notable absence from the new bill was any funding for the Cures Acceleration Network, an NIH program designed to speed new treatments to the clinic, authorized in the landmark 2010 health-reform law. NIH director Francis Collins is hoping that the network will underpin the National Center for Advancing Translational Sciences that he intends to launch in October. He and the administration are asking for $100 million for the network in next year's budget. However, the absence of any specified fund for it in 2011 does not bode well for funding levels in 2012.
"In that year and beyond, the threat is much greater," says David Moore, director of government relations at the Association of American Medical Colleges in Washington, D.C.
The short-term reality is harsher for the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), in Atlanta, Georgia. The portion of its budget controlled by Congress will be cut this year by 11.5%, or $742 million. (Some spending by the agency, for instance on vaccine programs, is automatic and not under Congressional control.)
Donald Hoppert, director of government relations at the American Public Health Association in Washington, D.C., says that his group is "deeply disappointed" with the cuts to the CDC. "[They] will jeopardize our efforts to address the growing burden of chronic disease and injury, infectious disease, and environmental hazards in communities across the nation. Any short-term savings are far outweighed by the long-term costs to the public's health," he says.
REGULATORY SCIENCE
During the budget debate, officials at the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) wondered whether the agency would receive enough money this year to begin to fulfil the requirements of the Food Safety Modernization Act. The act, which was signed into law on 4 January, gives the agency significant new powers to inspect both domestic and imported food products. House Republicans had proposed cutting the FDA's budget by $241 million, which would have been a major setback for the act. Instead, the final deal gives the FDA an increase of about $83 million, more than half of which is allocated to food safety.
In the realm of environmental regulation, Senate Democrats and the White House successfully fended off Republican efforts to hobble the Environmental Protection Agency by restoring nearly half of the $3 billion in proposed cuts, and keeping cuts for science-and-technology research programs at 4% relative to 2010. A Republican demand to strip the agency of its authority to regulate greenhouse-gas emissions was also removed from the final agreement.
"On climate, it is a pretty strong victory for the administration," says David Goldston, director of government affairs at the Natural Resources Defense Council in Washington, D.C. Although the administration gave some ground, Goldston says, the bill no longer represents an outright assault on environmental policies. "The broad attack is not there any more," he says. The bulk of the cuts to the EPA -- nearly $1 billion -- have been made in grants to states to develop clean water-related infrastructure. The bill also cuts $112.5 million from grants to help state regulatory agencies prepare for new federal air-quality and climate regulations.
ENERGY, EARTH, AND SPACE
The bill passed last week will reduce government funding for research on energy efficiency and renewable energy by $438 million, but that's modest compared with the much larger cut proposed by House Republicans. Similarly, the Energy Department's Advanced Research Project Agency-Energy will receive $180 million -- far short of Obama's original $300-million request, but more than triple what the Republicans allocated in February.
At the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), the bill prevents money from being spent on the agency's Climate Service, which the administration has proposed as a central clearing house for climate data and longer-term forecasting. It also flatlines funding for weather- and climate-monitoring activities under the Joint Polar Satellite System. On 13 April, NOAA director Jane Lubchenco warned a Senate subcommittee that delays caused by the funding shortfall could jeopardize forecasting ability.
At NASA, a 1.5% cut will allow the space agency to proceed with plans to develop its human-spaceflight infrastructure, including a multipurpose crew vehicle and a heavy-lift rocket, to which the new spending bill allocates a minimum of $1.2 billion and $1.8 billion, respectively. NASA's science program, which includes the over-budget James Webb Space Telescope (the launch of which has now been delayed until 2018), receives a robust $5 billion in the spending bill. But for NASA, as for other science agencies, the new budget leaves longer-term issues unsolved. With the final shuttle flight scheduled for June, the space agency faces a major transition this year --— to a hiatus in which the nation is unable to fly its own astronauts. Future budgets will determine the length of that gap.
| < Prev | Next > |
|---|
