(Courtesy: The San Francisco Chronicle)
INITSS ideological antipathy to government and its single-minded pursuit of balanced budget within seven years, Congress is about to sacrifice many of the programs that have helped to make America the most productive potion on Earth, The clear and present danger in next month’s final round of congressional budget deliberations is that the nation will be put on two contradictory trajectories afastirack route to a balanced federal budget and a slightly slower track to national bankruptcy in the technological, scientific and quality of life measures by which American wealth is best assessed.
Nowhere in the current scramble over the budget are those trends clearer than in the appropriations to date on federal research and development the building blocks of tomorrow’s national strength. One stunning pair of Statistics says tall While appropriations for military R&D at the Department of Defenses scheduled to increase by 4.2 percentt0 $3638 billion (or$1.6 billion more than the Pentagon requested), funds for nonmilitary R&D are slated for the steepest across-the-board cuts since World War I: a reduction of a full 33 percent by 2002, when the budget Presumably will be balanced.
As Richard Nicholson, head of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, whose members include most of the nation’s scientists, said in an interview with The Chronicle: “The reason for balancing the budget is so that we don’t screw our children and our children’s children, If, in the process Of doing that, we reduce the level of Scientific research, we may be making their future much worse than anything done by debt.”
According to a detailed budget analysis by AAAS, the nearly 8 percent cut in overall ‘nonmilitary R&D between this year and next masks devastating reductions—from a third to virtual elimination—for scores of worthy programs in Such diverse areas as alterative energies, global warming, species preservation, building of new telescopes and development of new materials for electronics, The only major R&D category to escape unscathed is health sciences, ‘which will receive a moderate increase.
Among significant programs going under the knife in fiscal 1996; NASA’s global warming monitoring (down 22 percent), mass transit (down 36 percent), water quality (29 percent), hazardous waste disposal (24 percent), toxic ‘substances (30 percent), nuclear nonproliferation (26 percent), new materials research (100 percent).
President Clinton’s promise to veto at least eight of the 11 appropriations bills may result in a so-called budget train ‘wreck on October 1. We think that’s clearly preferable to letting Congress put the nation on a certain course 10 scientific and technological bankruptcy in the next decade.
Article extracted from this publication >>September 8, 1995
