When Bush unveiled his last budget proposal in early February for the year beginning 1 October 2008, advocates for the physical sciences were preoccupied with trying to mitigate the cutbacks to current fiscal year programs that had blindsided them just a few weeks before. As a consequence of last year’s budget standoff between Bush and the Democrat-controlled Congress, most of the physical-sciences basic-research increases Bush had proposed and House and Senate appropriators endorsed suddenly vanished when the final version of a mammoth spending bill emerged from Capitol Hill and was signed into law in mid-December. The loss of those widely anticipated increases not only has pinched current-year research programs but has the effect of making some of the requested increases for next year appear particularly dramatic.
The Department of Energy’s (DOE’s) Office of Science, one of the three agencies that bankroll most federally sponsored basic research in the physical sciences,...
