Office of Science Director Raymond Orbach was upbeat in the wake of congressional approval in late November of the massive omnibus appropriations bill. The bill contained a 4.3% increase in R&D money for Orbach’s office; for the second year in a row his funding has gone up. Given years of flat funding for the Department of Energy’s Office of Science, Orbach is a big winner in the fiscal year 2005 funding of science.
“I think we’re very fortunate,” Orbach said. “I thought that it was a wonderful example of the administration and Congress developing a plan that is good for science.”
But Orbach’s good cheer is the exception, not the rule, in a science budget that sees nondefense R&D increase 2.2% to $57.2 billion. While that is better than the 1% overall increase for domestic programs, it is significantly less than nondefense science spending in recent years. And, according to...
