Comments on: Science Budget: the White House Proposal

By: ciro

ciro — Mon, 21 Feb 2011 03:08:26 +0000

The Senate Appropriations Committee on Energy is chaired by Diane Feinstien- which covers the DOE. She is also a Senator from the state of California which has a strong interest in the research funding- including the NSF.

She has a lot of say on the Senate version of the budget (both 2011 and 2012) so we should expect an improvement here.

By: A blogesfera de física « Ars Physica

A blogesfera de física « Ars Physica — Thu, 17 Feb 2011 23:34:22 +0000

[...] Science Budget: The White House Proposal (Cosmic Variance) [...]

By: JT

JT — Wed, 16 Feb 2011 20:48:26 +0000

JWST is not cut, it’s funding is pulled out separate from Astrophysics, and is held at a nominal value until their rebudgeting activities are done. On the other hand, all US activity in Euclid is now cancelled (deeply disappointing) and WFIRST is pushed out indefinitely (ie, until JWST ramps down). Great job that Decadal survey did laying out realistic priorities…

By: Gizelle Janine

Gizelle Janine — Tue, 15 Feb 2011 22:15:24 +0000

Oh private funding does wonders Sean. What’s a budget cut these days?

By: Matt

Matt — Tue, 15 Feb 2011 15:41:24 +0000

I have a good friend who works on James Webb – he says it’s still a go. They may have to revise their planning, but he’s confident it will launch, for what it’s worth.

By: chris

chris — Tue, 15 Feb 2011 14:20:58 +0000

no US colonies that is…

By: stonemason89

stonemason89 — Tue, 15 Feb 2011 13:27:54 +0000

So I guess no colonies on the Moon anytime soon.

By: Dave

Dave — Tue, 15 Feb 2011 07:46:52 +0000

The US spends $190 million A DAY in Afghanistan.

By: JoAnne

JoAnne — Tue, 15 Feb 2011 06:18:17 +0000

I think the cut in HEP has everything to do with the Tevatron. Pier insisted that operating the Tevatron was $35M/yr (an inflated figure btw), and now it’s been shut down we’ve been axed by roughly that amount. Thank you Pier.

By: Fermi-Walker Public Transport

Fermi-Walker Public Transport — Tue, 15 Feb 2011 04:46:31 +0000

This is worth watching, economist Jeffrey Sachs on the budget and related matters

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bCPz2SzROFQ

By: Douglas Watts

Douglas Watts — Tue, 15 Feb 2011 04:43:26 +0000

What’s the funding number for critically endangered species in the U.S. ?

After all, they can’t be ‘re-funded’ in the future. like a Mars mission.

They just go extinct.

Isn’t that of a different logical type than the Tevatron?

By: Jeff

Jeff — Tue, 15 Feb 2011 02:22:35 +0000

I find it a bit hard to get worked up one way or the other about the budget proposal, considering we’re almost 5 months into the fiscal year and STILL don’t have a real budget for 2011. That has caused all sorts of funding issues within NASA. By the time FY11 money does become available, there’s likely to be a major scramble to spend it before it gets yanked for 2012. Sigh…

By: Haelfix

Haelfix — Tue, 15 Feb 2011 01:10:38 +0000

This budget isn’t good either. The James Webb telescope is axed. HEP is cut.
We get pork for ‘clean energy research’ which sounds nice, except that in practise two things happen whenever you get highly targetted research proposals in fuzzy areas.

1) It gets partially eaten away by crackpots, b/c the people in the funding agencies have no idea how to distinguish between realistic programs and non realistic programs.
2) It gets eaten up by good scientists with superior grant writing abilities. For instance, back in the 90s my undergraduate advisor managed to get a grant from some government eco friendly fund to analyze ISM dust. How he managed to relate those two in the proposal, I will never know, but thats the way it works.

Rarely, does it ever produce anything specific to the original area.

Anyway, its just depressing. We further don’t know whats going to happen on the state level. Multiple states are looking at huge shortfalls, and there are talks about repeats of the California fiasco.

By: Wetuski

Wetuski — Mon, 14 Feb 2011 23:00:02 +0000

Yeah most people know this isn’t going to go through as is, it will be beat down as even Paul Krugman stated in an blog post today: http://krugman.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/02/14/the-new-obama-budget/

There probably will be indirect cost though as one it hits hard on lower/middle class which willl have an economic effect on all, though it is much better than the GOP’s laughable proposals, but that’s about the only good thing I have to say about it.
It also will make graduate students be forced into more debt, which might disincentives students from attending high level courses which would also put a hole into universities budgets (I dont really know how universities budgets work when regards to tuition so I am guessing on that one).
But this is just a symbolic proposal that won’t even be recognized when they’re done tearing through it in congress, lets just hope whatever comes out isn’t too damaging to us all.