SCIENCE and technology are the wellspring of innovation, new jobs and , but the US is underinvesting in them. The bipartisan budget deal reached in late October offers some much-needed relief for federal science agencies, but it remains a temporary fix for programs hit by the spending caps known as “sequestration“, which took effect in 2013.
The deal eases the caps, increasing total discretionary spending by 5.2 per cent for the 2016 fiscal year. Research and development budgets tend to track such increases. That is good news for the National Institutes of Health, for example, for which Senate appropriators had already sought a – the largest yearly boost in a decade. It could also improve prospects for the Obama administration’s by 5 per cent for the National Science Foundation and the Department of Energy’s Office of Science.
Now the bad news. The deal is set to expire after two years. That will make planning difficult for laboratory directors, leaving the future of the scientific enterprise uncertain. If policymakers leave the sequestration caps in place when the budget deal expires, and make no exception for science and technology, the US will invest tens of billions of dollars less on federal R&D over the next decade.
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That would continue a worrying trend. Federal R&D spending represents less than 0.8 per cent of GDP – . As a proportion of the federal budget, R&D investment has from 10 per cent in 1967 to less than 4 per cent now. The private sector has not filled the gap; we in the world in terms of research intensity – a measure of combined public and private spend on R&D as a share of GDP.
Such underinvestment not only slows scientific advancement, it also threatens the nation’s ability to address pressing global problems such as food, water and energy shortages, climate change and disease. Looming challenges, such as the predicted doubling every 20 years of dementia cases globally, may go unmet.
Sequestration caps should be dropped by Congress once and for all. Our future depends on a bipartisan consensus about the value of consistent, dependable federal R&D budgets. Without this, we risk missing the next big thing. Magnetic resonance imaging, lithium-ion batteries, liquid crystal displays, signal compression and magnetic storage devices all resulted from federally funded research. The algorithm that led to the Google search engine was developed by Larry Page and Sergey Brin while they were graduate students working under a grant.
The US must reposition itself as a world leader in science. Stronger investments now will bolster innovation and global scientific advances for years to come.
We are publishing simultaneous Leader articles on science funding in Australia and the UK: see
(Image: Marnie Burkhart/Plainpicture)
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Rush Holt is chief executive officer of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) and executive publisher of Science
(Image: Chet Susslin)
This article appeared in print under the headline “Unshackle science”
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