Frightening

The U.S. House of Representatives passed a budget resolution on the 16th of May. AAAS has now produced an analysis of how that budget and President Obama's budget would affect non-defense research and development spending from 2007-2017. The figure to the left summarizes the results of their analysis.

The "President's Budget" line (orange) is essentially flat, but it assumes that Congress and the President reach an agreement on the budget that avoids the sequestration that will automatically happen in January, 2013. The House of Representatives budget resolution would reduce that level of funding by about 15 percent. Transportation and energy research would be especially hard hit relative to the President's budget request (reductions of about 30 percent and nearly 50 percent, respectively).

The two "House Budget" lines project what will happen if sequestration happens. The "Current Seq" line (red) projects what will happen under current law (roughly 8 percent across the board cuts in non-defense spending, 10 percent in defense spending). The "Alternative Seq" line (blue) projects what will happen if all of the cuts are shifted to nondefense spending over the long term. The hit to non-defense R&D would be smaller in 2013 than under current law, but in later years the cuts would lead to drastic reductions in federal funding for scientific research.