"Beyond the Stimulus"
Elias A. Zerhouni*
Immediate past director of the U.S. National Institutes of Health.
The American public understands that innovation in science and technology is the best guarantor of our economic future. National research budgets are not subsidies but strategic investments to be sustained even in the worst of times. Thanks to the relevant administration and congressional leaders, science has been well served in the stimulus package just signed by President Obama. The $21.5 billion for R&D projects over the next 2 years is the result of compromises based on a variety of opinions as to the proper levels of support for U.S. science. Take funding for the National Institutes of Health (NIH), for example. The House initially proposed that the NIH receive $3.5 billion, whereas the Senate, under the extraordinary leadership of Senator Arlen Specter, proposed $10 billion, the figure in the final bill. So what should the appropriate level of support be beyond the stimulus? Is there a quantifiable rationale beyond "more is always better?"
First, the timing and amount of this stimulus could not have been more opportune. Since 2003, U.S. science budgets have fallen, when compared to the rate of inflation. In good economic times, the impact of these federal budget shortfalls was lessened by increased support from philanthropic foundations, more generous private gifts, larger endowment proceeds, and other sources such as state funding or clinical revenues. But all of these nonfederal sources are now severely depleted. In 2007, the sum total of endowments for the top 75 U.S. universities amounted to about $300 billion. Today, a quarter to a third of that value, or $75 billion to $100 billion, has disappeared. Gift giving is also drastically down. Estimates of these combined losses range from $7 billion to $10 billion for 2009 alone. Many universities have announced deep cost reductions and freezes on new positions that will have particularly negative consequences for young scientists. I have testified in Congress that for every $1 billion shortfall in the NIH base budget, an estimated 6000 to 9000 scientific jobs are lost, with an equal number of jobs lost in indirect support activities. With increased layoffs in industry, one has to be deeply concerned about the human research capacity of the United States across all sciences, a key determinant of our future competitiveness.
The economic stimulus will lessen these risks in the short term. But it is only a partial answer. It will not stave off the loss of talented scientists unless it is coupled with a longer-term increase in the base budgets of the research agencies. This would avoid the detrimental and painful effects of a rapid rise followed by a fall in budgets, as has been experienced by the NIH in recent years. What should the level of long-term support be? The NIH lost 15% of its purchasing power, or $4 billion, between 2003 and 2009. At a time when research is characterized by an interdisciplinary convergence between the physical and biological sciences, the base federal support for the physical and engineering disciplines has decreased to an even greater degree; these critical research fields would require additional support variously estimated at about $6 billion per year to reach a better balance between biological and physical sciences. Thus, beyond the stimulus, the base science budgets of the relevant domestic agencies should increase by at least $10 billion per year, a minimum goal to strive for by fiscal year 2012.
A nation's most strategic resource is the strength of its scientific workforce. It is imperative that the entire scientific community coalesce around a quantifiable and shared rationale for rebalancing the base domestic federal research budget beyond the one-time stimulus package. This is a task that will be made more difficult by growing federal deficits, but it may well be attainable given the clear and welcome commitment to science just shown by the new U.S. administration and Congress.
Elias A. Zerhouni is the immediate past director of the U.S. National Institutes of Health.
U.S. BUDGET:
"Science Wins $21 Billion Boost as Stimulus Package Becomes Law".
Eli Kintisch*
The scene: a jittery Washington, D.C., amid the worst global economic crisis in decades. The main character: a young president who has promised to "restore science to its rightful place." The supporting cast: a Congress dominated by Democrats heeding President Barack Obama's call not only to "create new jobs but to lay a new foundation for growth."
This week, those elements culminated in a historic $787 billion economic stimulus package that provides more than $21 billion for research and scientific infrastructure. Having a role in the biggest one-time federal outlay since the New Deal has been a surprise for scientists, on whom the Obama plan lavished a variety of cash investments. These include $10 billion for the National Institutes of Health (NIH), $3 billion for the National Science Foundation (NSF), and $1.6 billion for the Department of Energy's (DOE's) Office of Science.
Scientists are euphoric. "It's incredible; more than we've seen in a long time," said Francis DiSalvo, a materials chemist at Cornell University. The infusion comes after a series of annual appropriations bills that doled out relatively flat budgets for many federal science agencies. Some research policy experts are wary of the audacious lump-sum approach. "It's an incredibly rapid infusion of an unprecedented amount of money for scientific research to be spent in an extremely short amount of time," said Daniel Sarewitz of Arizona State University, Tempe.
U.S. science lobbyists first realized that they might be in for a piece of the stimulus pie soon after Obama was elected. As talk spread of combating the deteriorating economy with aggressive spending and tax breaks, the initial focus was on scientific construction projects, says Michael Lubell of the American Physical Society. But Obama's transition team and congressional staffers soon broadened their requests to include proposed investment in research, arguing that putting people to work on innovative ideas could generate even more well-paying jobs down the road (Science, 16 January, p. 318).
House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) led the way by declaring that "science, science, science" was central to the Democratic agenda. In turn, the House version of the stimulus bill included the large boosts for DOE, NSF, and NASA that ended up in the final bill. Those increases mirrored levels Congress proposed as part of the 2007 America COMPETES Act, which authorizes spending that has never materialized.
Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-NV) had a tougher political job. Two votes shy of a filibuster-proof majority, he had to woo a few Republicans, who generally wanted less spending and more tax cuts. Maine's two moderate Republicans, senators Susan Collins and Olympia Snowe, teamed up with Senator Ben Nelson (D-NE) to craft a compromise bill that lopped off $100 billion from what was then before the Senate.
The science community was aghast when the first version of the compromise proposed dropping NSF from the package entirely. They enlisted heavyweights from academia and industry to make the case for the agency's role as an economic driver. At the same time Senator Arlen Specter (R-PA), a longtime supporter of biomedical research, successfully added $6.5 billion to the $3.5 billion that NIH had been allocated and made it clear that his support for the overall package was contingent on retaining a boost of that magnitude. "The cost-of-living adjustments have not been made," Specter said during floor debate on the bill. "There has been an actual decline of some $5.2 billion of NIH funding in the last 7 years."
The compromise Senate bill still provided generally lower levels for most science agencies, however, and lobbyists credit Pelosi as well as the White House for restoring the House levels in a conference between the two bodies. "She deserves great credit, as does the Obama Administration," says Toby Smith of the Association of American Universities in Washington, D.C.
In the end, NIH received the biggest bounty. The $30-billion-a-year agency receives an additional $8.2 billion for research, spread out over the current and next fiscal years, as well as $500 million for construction and renovation of NIH's intramural labs and $1.3 billion for research facilities and instrumentation elsewhere. NASA will get $1 billion on top of its yearly $17 billion budget, with lawmakers targeting Democratic favorites such as supercomputing and earth science ($400 million), aeronautics ($150 million), and a new launcher ($400 million). DOE's $4 billion Office of Science receives an extra $1.6 billion, with no strings attached. The need is great, say scientists. "Most buildings here are very old," says physicist Michael Norman of DOE's Argonne National Laboratory in Illinois, which is hoping for a new interdisciplinary center for energy research.
Congress also added another $400 million for a new entity called the Advanced Research Projects Agency for Energy. The idea is to emulate the long-standing Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), credited with giving birth to the Internet and other important commercial technologies. Jane "Xan" Alexander, former deputy director of DARPA, says the new agency will help technologies avoid the socalled Valley of Death that separates basic and applied research at DOE.
But it's arguably NSF that will see the biggest impact from the stimulus bill. Steven Beering, chair of its oversight body, the National Science Board, says the $3 billion spending boost for the $6-billion-a-year agency "is phenomenal. … It'll enfranchise many people who wouldn't otherwise have been funded and allow NSF to fund more high-risk, transformational research." Some $2 billion will be spent on research grants and $100 million for education programs. It also contains $900 million for various infrastructure projects, including $200 million to revive an academic facilities program. The board will take up how the influx affects NSF's priorities at its meeting next week, Beering adds.
Although Sarewitz says that funding science may be a worthy cause, he sees potential harm from its inclusion in the stimulus package. "If this spending is for [economic] stimulus, then it's not at all clear that R&D is a good way to get money into the economy quickly," he says. "If, on the other hand, it's long-term investment, then there's no reason to ram it into the system so quickly."
But such doubts are hard to find among a science establishment grown accustomed to flat budgets. Richard Marchase, president of the Federation of American Societies for Experimental Biology, admits to some worries of a poststimulus letdown. But for right now, he says, "we're very, very appreciative."
With reporting by Dan Charles, Lila Guterman, Andrew Lawler, and Jeffrey Mervis.
Science. ISSN 0036-8075 (print), 1095-9203 (online)
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