Funding for science and technology research in the United States is in trouble. For years, spending by the federal government, particularly through the National Science Foundation (NSF) and the National Institutes of Health (NIH), has been critical to supporting the basic research that often leads to innovative technologies and the startup of innovative companies. But as our special report “Follow the Money” explains, sharp cutbacks in the 2005 federal budget for non-defense-related research is creating an inhospitable climate for the emergence of new technologies.
One of the most troubling aspects of this crisis in federal funding is that it has gained so little attention from the general public and from the financial community, which has long benefited from federally supported R&D. Leading figures in the U.S. research community, such as Shirley Ann Jackson, president of the Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute and 2004 president of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, have been vocal and energetic in warning about basic research’s funding woes. But it seems that few outside the university research community are listening, or care.
Current cuts in basic-research support could not, in many ways, come at a worse time. As Jackson points out in our special report, while defense R&D received large increases in the 2005 federal budget, basic research across a broad front is also vital to our national security. For example, the missile defense program, which many scientists think has little chance of success, received one of the largest spending increases in 2005, a 15.8 percent jump to $8.8 billion. But surely it’s worth asking how Congress and the administration expect any ambitious technology program, including missile defense, to succeed without the fundamental research in physics and engineering necessary to support it.
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