Brazil’s Researchers Criticize Budget Freeze

Scientists have attacked the government’s spending policies after it locked down nearly half of the money that had been allocated for science funding.

Written byCatherine Offord

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Brazil’s government has triggered fierce criticism from scientists after announcing plans to tackle economic stagnation by implementing a government-wide budget freeze that could see research funding cut by up to 42 percent. The lockdown of 30 billion reais (US $7.5 billion), which was announced at the end of last month (March 29), has particularly hit the country’s Ministry of Science, Technology, Innovation and Communication (MCTIC), which will now have just 2.9 billion reais (US $751 million) for research and development this year.

“We were running on a flat tire; now they took out the wheel,” Ildeu de Castro Moreira, a physicist at the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro and president of the Brazilian Society for the Advancement of Science, tells Science. “We knew there might be another contingency measure on the way, but we never expected it to be so extreme. . . . When ...

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Meet the Author

Catherine Offord
After undergraduate research with spiders at the University of Oxford and graduate research with ants at Princeton University, Catherine left arthropods and academia to become a science journalist. She has worked in various guises at The Scientist since 2016. As Senior Editor, she wrote articles for the online and print publications, and edited the magazine’s Notebook, Careers, and Bio Business sections. She reports on subjects ranging from cellular and molecular biology to research misconduct and science policy. Find more of her work at her website.
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