By Janet Raloff
The Obama administration rolled out new details on May 7 about its blueprint for federal spending in the coming year. And no matter how you cut it, science comes out a big winner. The current proposal is to spend $147.6 billion on research and development during the next fiscal year, which begins Oct. 1 — $555 million more than Congress enacted for the current fiscal year.
This spending would be supplemented by the already approved Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009, also known as the economic-stimulus package. It directs the government to pump $20 billion into R&D, money to be spent between now and the end of fiscal year 2010, said White House science adviser John Holdren at a press briefing held at the American Association for the Advancement of Science in Washington, D.C. Most of this is being directed into basic and applied research, he added.
For instance, the stimulus directs that the National Institutes of Health spend $10 billion on biomedical research and laboratory upgrades or construction. It provides another $1 billion to be shared between NIH and the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality on studies that compare either the effectiveness of different treatments, or the effectiveness of one treatment for different populations.