LEAN times are ahead for science in the US if the Republicans who now hold sway in Congress get their way. One of their key promises before last year鈥檚 election was to balance the federal budget by the year 2002. Now, in a budget plan released last week, they make it plain that much of the saving will come by cutting back spending on science.
The Republicans focus on programmes that develop technologies that have commercial promise. Republican Robert Walker, who is chairman of the House of Representatives Science Committee, derides such projects as 鈥渃orporate welfare鈥� which businesses should be funding themselves.
Instead, the Republicans say the government should spend its money on basic research. The National Science Foundation might be ordered to abandon research into social and behavioural sciences. The Republicans would cut much of the government鈥檚 spending on energy
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The budget for the international space station would remain intact. But the Republicans would slash $2.7 billion from NASA鈥檚 Mission to Planet Earth, a constellation of satellites that would monitor changes in the Earth鈥檚 climate. Walker says he is convinced that NASA is wasting money on the computer systems that will analyse and distribute the data. (This Week, 29 January 1994.)
Walker claims that the plan鈥檚 emphasis on basic science will strengthen American research. But Democrat George Brown, Walker鈥檚 principal opponent and predecessor as committee chairman, says that once inflation is taken into account civilian science will be left with 35 per cent less in 2000 than it gets today. He calls the proposal 鈥渢he equivalent of unilateral disarmament in the war to maintain the American standard of living鈥�.