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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 ...
