Drastic Cuts to Brazil’s Federal Science Budget

The 44 percent drop in funding is disproportionately large compared to overall reductions in government spending.

Kerry Grens

| 2 min read

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Federally funded science in Brazil will have to make do with 44 percent less money than it received last year. As Nature News reported, the Ministry of Science, Technology, Innovations and Communications (MCTIC) will receive roughly $900 million in 2017, the smallest science budget in 12 years.

“There will be a huge break-up of teams which will be hard to rebuild,” Fernando Peregrino, president of the National Council of Foundations to Support Institutions of Higher Education and Scientific and Technological Research, an organization based in Brazil’s Federal District, told Nature. “We’ve climbed another step down.”

Altogether, government agencies are facing a 28 percent cut in funds in response to a major recession, “so the cut to science is particularly severe,” Nature News reported. Science funding ...

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Meet the Author

Kerry Grens
Kerry served as The Scientist’s news director until 2021. Before joining The Scientist in 2013, she was a stringer for Reuters Health, the senior health and science reporter at WHYY in Philadelphia, and the health and science reporter at New Hampshire Public Radio. Kerry got her start in journalism as a AAAS Mass Media fellow at KUNC in Colorado. She has a master’s in biological sciences from Stanford University and a biology degree from Loyola University Chicago.
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