عمومی | science mag

Trump’s 2021 budget drowns science agencies in red ink, again

It’s another sea of red ink for federal research funding programs in President Donald Trump’s latest budget proposal. The 2021 budget request to Congress released today calls for deep, often double-digit cuts to R&D spending at major science agencies.

At the same time, the president wants to put more money into a handful of areas—notably artificial intelligence (AI) and quantum information science (QIS)—to create the new technology needed for what the budget request calls “industries of the future.”

Here is a rundown of some of the numbers from the budget request’s R&D chapter . (The numbers reflect the portion of each agency’s budget classified as research, which in most cases is less than its overall budget.)

There are a few budgetary bright spots. One is USDA’s National Institute of Food and Agriculture, the source of most of the department’s competitive grants to academic research, which would grow by 11%, or $95 million, to $968 million. Within that institute, its competitive grants program—now at $425 million—would have $100 million earmarked for AI and machine learning. Likewise, the president is asking NSF to fit large increases for AI and QIS into its shrunken research account.

Overall, federal spending on civilian basic research would drop by 9%, or $13.78 billion, to $142.185 billion. The government’s investment in scientific infrastructure—large facilities and special equipment—would plunge by 40%, to $3.6 billion. Spending on defense basic research would fall by 6%, or $2.822 billion, to $40.638 billion.

As always, Congress will have the final say on spending for the 2021 fiscal year, which begins on 1 October. In recent years, lawmakers have largely rejected the Trump administration’s proposed cuts and instead increased major science agency budgets, or at least held them flat.

In 2021, however, Congress will have limited room to increase spending, because of a budget deal reached in July 2019 that places caps on both civilian and defense spending. In particular, it would allow only a $2.5 billion increase in all domestic discretionary spending, for example, or only 0.4% more than the $632 billion being spent in fiscal 2020.