Communications of the ACM
Massive 2021 U.S. Spending Bill Leaves Research Advocates Hoping for More
President Donald Trump will leave office next year having overseen robust growth in federal science spending.
Credit: Carlos Barria / Reuters
The massive $1.4 trillion spending bill that U.S. President Donald Trump signed into law on Tuesday (December 22) reverses the deep cuts the outgoing president had proposed for most science agencies. Even so, the modest hikes for 2021 have left the research community wanting more.
The final budget package includes increases of 3% for the National Institutes of Health, 2.5% for the National Science Foundation, 2.3% for NASA science, and 0.4% for the Department of Energy science office.
Spending by DOE science now stands at $7 billion, compared with $5.4 billion in 2017, a boost of 30%. NSF's budget, now nearly $8.5 billion, has grown the least among the four biggest federal science agencies.
Many research advocates are greeting the 2021 numbers with a collective shrug. Research advocates also are reacting to the $900 billion COVID-19 relief measure that was attached to the annual spending bill.
University administrators had lobbied for $122 billion to recover from the impact of the pandemic on their faculty and students. In addition, they had calculated that federal agencies needed at least $26 billion more to finance research lost or delayed when campuses were shut down in the spring.
The relief bill contains only $22 billion for higher education, however, and nothing explicitly for bolstering the research enterprise.
From Science
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