When President Bush sent his fiscal year 2003 budget proposal to Capitol Hill last February, House Science Committee Chairman Sherwood Boehlert (R-N.Y.) noted the 17% increase proposed for the National Institutes of Health and the 5% offering for NSF and wasn’t happy. Describing the NSF funding proposal as “anemic,” Boehlert observed that “just the increase in the NIH budget is larger than the research budget of NSF.”
Boehlert represented the views of many Democrats and Republicans in Congress. Yet after a summer in which it seemed certain that the NSF budget would be tracked into years of significant budget increases, a last-minute procedural move by one cost-conscious senator stopped everything. Almost everybody, including officials at the administration’s Office of Management and Budget (OMB), agrees that NSF should have more money. But with deficits growing and the threat of war looming, the administration doesn’t want to commit to doing for NSF...
