WIKIMEDIA, PSYCHONAUGHTWell before the first of this year, there were dire warnings that budgets at federal science agencies, such as the National Institutes of Health (NIH) and the National Science Foundation (NSF), would be on the chopping block if Democrats and Republicans in Congress could not work through partisan bickering to hammer out a deal to decrease the deficit by $1.2 trillion over 10 years. On August 2, 2012, President Barack Obama signed the Budget Control Act of 2011, which formed a bipartisan committee tasked with marshalling deficit-reduction legislation through Congress, and mandated 10-year-long, across-the-board cuts—or sequestration—to military and domestic spending if that committee failed.
And it did fail.
The sequester was set to begin on January 1, but was delayed by two months because of another piece of legislation, the American Taxpayer Relief Act of 2012. On March 1, sequestration went into effect, and almost immediately US scientists and their collaborators abroad began to feel the pinch. The NIH was forced to slash its 2013 budget by 5 percent, or $1.55 billion. According to its own estimates, the agency eliminated more than 700 new grants, and an average of 4.7 percent was cut from ongoing grant budgets.
The NSF fared a bit better, having to trim its budget by only 2.9 percent, thanks to a temporary spending bill passed later in March.
Life scientists hoping to get new NIH ...
