Newswise — White House science advisor John H. Marburger III proudly brags that 5.7 percent of total discretionary fiscal 2005 outlays--the part of the budget that is controllable year to year--would go to nondefense R&D, the third highest level of funding for research in 25 years. That is right, as far as it goes, but the aggregate figures mask the evisceration of research funding in some important areas.
The president has asked for about $48 billion for nondefense R&D, an impressive sum, but the amount requested for military research is even higher, at $69.9 billion. An additional $4.4 billion in research funding for the Pentagon would go entirely to the development of weapons systems, mostly to the Missile Defense Agency, whose funding jumps 20 percent to $9.1 billion, in preparation for deployment of missile defenses beginning this year. Meanwhile, the military's basic research budget falls 4.5 percent to $1.3 billion, while applied research skids 13.5 percent to $3.8 billion.
Those cuts in basic and applied defense research, taken together with a squeeze on technology funding in many parts of the civilian R&D budget request, prompted representatives of four major scientific societies, including IEEE-USA's John Steadman, to submit a statement to the House of Representatives Committee on Science. "We believe that the president's budget request for the physical sciences, mathematics, and engineering places the future of our nation at great risk, economically and militarily," it says.
Barely two weeks after President Bush submitted his budget request, the Union of Concerned Scientists (UCS, an advocacy organization headquartered in Cambridge, Mass.) issued a report denouncing the U.S. government for misrepresenting science and scientific opinion on issues from air pollution and climate change to drug evaluation and military intelligence. The report, titled "Scientific Integrity in Policy-making," and a statement accompanying its release, signed by 60 Nobel laureates, said, "when scientific knowledge has been found to be in conflict with its political goals, the administration has often manipulated the process by which science enters into its decisions." The UCS report provided particularly compelling documentation of distortion in the administration's presentation of climate science and military intelligence.
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