White House budget plan would slash science
Fiscal 2018 proposal calls for deep cuts in spending for EPA, NIH and other agencies
SHOW ME THE MONEY President Donald Trump has released his budget request for fiscal year 2018. It includes deep cuts to some federal science agencies including the Environmental Protection Agency and the National Institutes of Health, but other agencies, such as NASA, emerge relatively unscathed.
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Huge cuts could be in store for federal science spending if President Donald Trump’s vision for fiscal year 2018 becomes reality.
Although details are skimpy, Trump’s $1.15 trillion budget proposal, released March 16, would make national security the top priority. The budget blueprint calls for a $54 billion increase in defense spending for 2018, offset by an equally big reduction in nondefense activities. Among the biggest science losers are the Environmental Protection Agency, which could see its budget shrink by 31 percent compared with 2017, and the National Institutes of Health, which faces an 18 percent spending slash. The Department of Energy’s Office of Science could lose about 17 percent of its funding while DOE’s Advanced Research Projects Agency-Energy, or ARPA-E — which supports research on promising energy technologies —
