Within the first 10 minutes of the unveiling of the administration’s fiscal year 2007 science and technology budget on 6 February, leading federal science officials were using superlatives like “historic,” “spectacular,” “extraordinary,” and “exciting.” For those in the US physical sciences community who have seen five years of flat non-defense federal research funding, the superlatives certainly appear apt.
The science budget proposal, the first step in President Bush’s American Competitiveness Initiative, calls for doubling “innovation-enabling research” at NSF, NIST, and the Department of Energy’s Office of Science over a 10-year period. That includes a proposed $910 million boost in FY 2007 and $50 billion more over the next decade.
The good fortune of at least some aspects of the science budget is tied to efforts by the scientific, academic, and industrial communities over the past few years to impress upon the administration that the nation’s economic health is tied to...