Budget Agreement Boosts US Science (sciencemag.org) 52
sciencehabit writes: The National Institutes of Health (NIH) leads the way among U.S science agencies getting increases in the final 2016 spending bill released today. NIH is the winner in absolute dollars. It gets a bump of $2 billion, or 6.6%, from its current budget of $30.1 billion. Spending on science programs at NASA would grow by 6.6%, to $5.6 billion, and rise by 5.6% in the Department of Energy's (DOE's) Office of Science, to $5.35 billion. The National Science Foundation would receive an additional $119 million, or 1.6%, to $7.46 billion, and the Advanced Research Projects Agency-Energy would get a 6% boost, to $291 million.
NASA in particular got great allocations for planetary science and commercial crew.
Great! (Score:4, Interesting)
Now all they need to do is pass the thing. Does anyone know what kind of poison pill has been inserted yet, which will cause somebody to get off the boat and sink it? We all know there is one...
It's a sad state when the budget process has been reduced to such cynicism, but here we are.
Re:Great! (Score:5, Interesting)
Now all they need to do is pass the thing. Does anyone know what kind of poison pill has been inserted yet, which will cause somebody to get off the boat and sink it? We all know there is one...
They actually somewhat compromised, hoping Obama will sign the damn thing.
Republicans gave up defunding Planned Parenthood.
Democrats pulled out proposed additional gun control.
Republicans gave in on not adding vetting for Syrian refugees.
Possibly some others.
Sounds like they actually want this passed.
I'm sure it's full of pork, but aren't they all.
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Republicans gave up defunding Planned Parenthood.
Democrats pulled out proposed additional gun control.
Yes. Sad to say, but any day our government manages to avoid further eroding our rights, it feels like a significant victory.
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You do!
Planned Parenthood meanwhile does many other worthwhile things including preventing pregnancies which prevents abortions.
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Sounds more like they predictably let go of their grand standing proposals made to appease their rightmost and leftmost leaning constituents, and ultimately passed a very status quo bill in the end. Business as usual. They throw a few billion around since it sounds like a lot of money to regular people, when on the national level it will have little to no impact on any of our biggest problems.
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Now all they need to do is pass the thing. Does anyone know what kind of poison pill has been inserted yet, which will cause somebody to get off the boat and sink it? We all know there is one...
They actually somewhat compromised, hoping Obama will sign the damn thing.
Republicans gave up defunding Planned Parenthood.
Democrats pulled out proposed additional gun control.
Republicans gave in on not adding vetting for Syrian refugees.
Possibly some others.
Sounds like they actually want this passed.
I'm sure it's full of pork, but aren't they all.
A couple of other biggies: They ended the ban on exporting domestic crude oil and they extended tax credits for wind and solar power for another 5 years.
This is agreed by Obama, Democrats and Republicans (Score:5, Informative)
This budget has been agreed to by Obama and the Republican leadership in Congress, including Paul Ryan, and Congressional Democrats have expressed approval and talked about their "wins".
Obama likes it because they put off paying for Obamacare another couple of years. The taxes on health insurance and medical equipment will be delayed until after the election and 2020, respectively.
Re:This is agreed by Obama, Democrats and Republic (Score:4, Insightful)
Obama likes it because they put off paying for Obamacare another couple of years. The taxes on health insurance and medical equipment will be delayed until after the election and 2020, respectively.
O has done a masterful job at delaying the biggest cost impacts.
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Taxes on health insurance and medical care? Wtf.
Tax the thing you are trying to make more affordable. Nice.
Tax anything...or everything else, to pay for it. Not that. Idiots.
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Taxes on health insurance and medical care? Wtf.
Tax the thing you are trying to make more affordable. Nice.
Well, that all depends on who they're trying to make it affordable for.
In this case, it's taking money from people who already had insurance to pay for those who didn't. That's why people who oppose Obamacare oppose it. It's a direct hit on the middle class, who are already carrying the majority of the tax burden.
But tell people it's free health care and they want it.
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Not great at all. (Score:1)
https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20151216/05514933094/as-predicted-congress-turned-cisa-into-clear-surveillance-bill-put-it-into-must-pass-govt-funding-bill.shtml
Article on Techdirt saying someone has stuffed CISA into this bill. Not as horrible as the final draft of CISA proposed yesterday but still rather terrible and still a surveillance bill.
Contact your Rep and Senator today, or this will likely be made law.
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The House "Science" committee decides who gets the money...
billion here, a billion there, pretty soon, (Score:2)
NASA budget is mostly good news... (Score:2, Informative)
... except for two things:
1) The giant waste of money known as the SLS/Space Launch System, whose budget request was a huge 1,3 billion for this year, was instead given 2 billion. Congress clearly likes flushing money down the toilet.
2) The STMD/Space Technology Mission Directorate has been having its budget cut each year, and while it got a nominal rise this year, it was tasked with taking over RESTORE-L from the ISS's budget, so it's yet another negative. STMD is the branch which develops and tests new
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Please explain why SLS makes any sense whatsoever.
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Congress clearly likes flushing money down the toilet.
That's tiny compared to what Congress normally flushes down the toilet.
8 dollars per capita (Score:2)
If the entirety of those two budgets were misallocated, I'd still call it a remarkably good budget.
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news on NOAA, USGS, BLS? (Score:2)
NIH increase == keep the lights on (Score:5, Informative)
If we want to be a competitive nation in terms of scientific research we need to at least fund the NIH enough to meet operating expense increases so researchers can do work and get paid at (or slightly above, if their lucky) the levels of janitors.
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Professors/Principal investigators just hire more graduate students and postdoctoral researchers for the same salary.
Actually it is a little more complicated than that. Grants usually are required to specify who will do the work, what their title is, and why. This is part of why the largest single-PI grants are dozens of pages long, as the PI is specifying the division of labor. It is very difficult to get around it downstream, even if you only want to swap in a postdoc for a grad student (or vice-versa).
Trickle-down economics doesn't work for science.
You forgot to end that with either. It doesn't work in science just as it doesn't work anywhere else.
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If a decade after a huge budget increase, maintaining that level of high spending is considered "keeping the lights on," then it's no wonder we have a massive budget deficit. Perhaps NIH should have its budget reduced to Clinton-era levels for one year so they can once again appreciate j
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If a decade after a huge budget increase, maintaining that level of high spending is considered "keeping the lights on," then it's no wonder we have a massive budget deficit.
You're not seeing the forest for the trees, here. The proper way to think about the budget for a lab is as the budget for a small business. You might be able to come up with an exception but I can not imagine a business anywhere in this country that is operating on the same budget they had 10 years ago and seeing the same margins. Literally everything costs more now than it did a decade ago; we pay more for electricity, we pay more for heat and water, we pay more for space. Even if the PI doesn't take a
Not too happy about Precision Health Initiative (Score:2)
Not too happy about Precision Health Initiative.
"Participants will be involved in the design of the Initiative and will have the opportunity to contribute diverse sources of data—including medical records; profiles of the patient’s genes, metabolites (chemical makeup), and microorganisms in and on the body; environmental and lifestyle data; patient-generated information; and personal device and sensor data."
They're looking for a million volunteers to give away all their health related and lifest
CISA surveillance bill was hidden inside this!!! (Score:1)
http://www.engadget.com/2015/12/16/congress-tucked-cisa-in-budget-bill/
We can end this if we work together: http://www.freestateproject.org/
We'll need it (Score:3)
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A start, but not enough (Score:2)
The NIH and NSF budgets would need a much larger bump to really kick off some major new initiatives, much less restore funding to useful programs. Translational medicine research programs have stalled, and major disease foundations are having to fund tons of foundational work. Also, there's no "moonshot" type of projects, for example, setting a goal of creating a battery that has 50% more capacity for the same weight (vs current best technology), notable gains in wind or solar efficiency, massive improveme