With President Obama calling for a spending freeze on non-defense discretionary spending, I thought I would find a nice graph to put what that means into perspective. Luckily, the Congressional Budget Office is pretty good at this sort of thing:
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Now what does this mean for science, chemistry, and research and development funding? To be honest, we don’t really know yet. The federal agencies that fund a majority of chemistry research (NSF, NIH, DOE, etc.) are all part of the non-defense discretionary spending piece of pie (the yellow piece), but that doesn’t mean their funding will be frozen.
While there will be a total freeze, it will still be possible for funding to increase as long as something else is cut. I would, for example, expect funding to increase for green technologies and renewable energy research.
Hope that helps.
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<div>Thanks for putting the budget in perspective. It is funny that the great debates over the U.S. budget are really debates over just 17 percent of our nation's spending.</div>
<div>I agree that putting a freeze on 17% of the budget is probably not going to make a big difference. In fact, it might be very detrimental. I believe the research is still being done on this topic, but I've heard that for every dollar the US spends on research we get at least $3 dollars back into the economy. This gain is not only due to the new products that brought to the market place, but because science funding goes towards paying for materials, equipment, and supplies which are often produced by American manufacturers, or American chemical plants. In the end, freezing science might hurt the economy more than spending a few extra billion dollars. </div>
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