Science in the 2010 budget

The United States faces enormous fiscal challenges.

Under current law, CBO [the Congressional Budget Office] projects that the budget deficit this year, will be about $1.3 trillion, or more than 9 percent of the country's total output. (source)

Last week President Obama announced a three-year cap on federal government spending for discretionary, non-defense programs (see, for example, this article from last week's New York Times). Nonetheless, in the budget proposal President Obama transmitted to Congress today, we find a substantial commitment to the future of science and technology in this country. Here are a few items that caught my eye in the list that reporters at Science magazine have compiled:

• A $1 billion increase, to $32.1 billion, for the National Institutes of Health. That 3%-plus boost is aimed at keeping NIH on pace with inflationary costs for doing biomedical research.
• A $550 million boost, to $7.4 billion, for the National Science Foundation. Almost all of that 8% increase would go to NSF's six research directorates, with a special emphasis on clean energy and sustainability. Its education and training programs would rise by 2%.
• A $226 million hike, to $5.1 billion, for the Office of Science within the Department of Energy (DOE). The department's 3-year-old effort to jump-start a low-carbon economy, the Advanced Research Projects Agency-Energy, would get $300 million as its first annual budget. A scaled-down education and training initiative, RE-ENERGYSE, would get $74 million, after Congress rejected a much larger program proposed last year.