Let’s assume you’ve already watched our brand new documentary on Fermilab’s Tevatron collider and America’s steadily growing reticence to fund scientific research, particularly the sort devoted to Big Questions, and how once upon a time the U.S. was building a particle collider to put the Large Hadron Collider to shame. So you already have some idea of the situation over here with respect to the rest of the still-curious world that’s maintained an interest in driving knowledge forward. Things are poised to get much worse actually, and very soon, thanks to last year’s federal budget fiasco and the general disinterest on the parts of our lawmakers to act like adults.The mechanism for the cuts is the Budget Control Act. If you remember about a year ago, congress and the president were sparring over the debt-ceiling and our need to raise it so that we can pay our bills. Usually the increase is more of a procedural matter than a focus of intense debate — bills are bills, not policy questions — but the Tea Bagger wing of the House of Representatives used the debt-ceiling vote as a place to dig in and make a bunch of demands mostly relating to spending cuts, with the express goal of eventually balancing the budget (but, arguably, driven as much by anti-spending/anti-government ideology).Instead of actually settling anything, Congress and the president devised an elaborate way to put off the argument: the debt-ceiling would get raised, but a super-special Congressional committee would be convened that would have to find ways to do it, to cut about $1.5 trillion from the federal budget over the next 10 years. It failed miserably and embarrassingly.—That failure means the cuts happen automatically, in a process known as the “sequester.” Rather than being cuts made with actual consideration for the things being cut, the sequester lops off an equal amount from every government agency. According to a Nature piece today, that would come out to be about 7.8 percent for 2013, depending somewhat on revenue. And that number is even somewhat optimistic. Nature continues, “Research advocates are particularly concerned that the sequester might be adjusted to prevent cuts to defence. If that happened, non-military programmes would be forced to bear more than twice the currently mooted cut. Such an extreme measure would threaten entire facilities and sideline thousands of research grants.”“A lot of programmes wouldn't survive,” Mike Lubell, director of public affairs for the American Physical Society, told Nature. "They'd be vaporized." And understand that 7.8 percent isn’t from individual programs, it’s from agencies. Which means that a federal agency could decide to totally nix one program so they don’t have to cut another — in other words, the agency decides increasing funding for program x is more important than the bare existence program y. (Only one agency likely won’t have its budget go down, the National Institutes of Standards and Technology (NIST), and that’s only because its initial budget request included a very large increase.)The biggest losers will likely be the Centers for Disease Control, NASA’s science arm, the National Institutes of Health, and the Environmental Protection Agency. Both the CDC and NASA stand to lose over 10 percent in 2013, factoring in pre-existing planned budget cuts. And this could all go away if congress and the president come up with something better by the end of September, when the 2013 budget year begins. But if they couldn’t get it together enough to solve this last year, don’t expect anything real to happen in an election year.A final note. The cut looming over just the Department of Energy’s Office of Science is about $300 million (based on 2012 figures here). For reference, the entire operating budget of Fermilab is about $50 million above this, based on the president’s original 2013 budget request for the project. 7.8 percent is much, much bigger than it might seem.Reach this writer at michaelb@motherboard.tv.
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“Such an extreme measure would threaten entire facilities and sideline thousands of research grants.”
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