National Science Foundation Available to Purchase

Assuming that Congress would approve the President's recommendation for a fourteen million dollar budget for the National Science Foundation's first year of operation, it had originally been estimated that funds to be available for NSF support of basic research in the medical, biological, physical, mathematical, and engineering sciences would total more than eight million dollars. Over five million dollars were to have been allocated for graduate and post‐doctoral fellowships under its program for training scientific manpower. The House of Representatives, however, cut the requested budget to $300,000 after which the Senate proposed a figure of $6,300,000. Final arbitration by a joint Senate‐House conference committee resulted in a final appropriation of $3,500,000 for NSF operations during the present fiscal year (July 1, 1951 to June 30, 1952).