Washington DC

Key US science agencies held on to slim gains this month as Congress approved next year's budget. But they may lose these rises and more in an across-the-board 2006 spending cut to help pay for hurricane relief in the southern United States and for the ongoing war in Iraq.

Lawmakers base the budget on what the president requests in February of each year (see Nature 433, 559–560; 2005), but they have the authority to increase or cut funding and to specify how dollars will be spent.

The National Science Foundation has done relatively well. Last year, the agency's budget was cut by 3%, but this year it was restored by the same amount, to US$5.6 billion, with $4.2 billion for research (see graph). Given the tight fiscal environment, this was a reasonable achievement, says Samuel Rankin, who chairs a lobby group, the Coalition for National Science Funding. “Under the circumstances, I'm quite pleased,” he says.

NASA also did fairly well. Congress gave the space agency $16.4 billion — nearly as much as the president asked for and 1.3% more than last year. The research budget gets a boost of 7.3% to keep the early development of launchers and a crew vehicle for lunar expeditions on track. A shuttle mission to repair the Hubble Space Telescope is still in the picture. And lawmakers added money for several projects that the White House had short-changed, including the Space Interferometry Mission to search for planets around other stars and an Earth-science mission known as Glory.

Still, the chairman of the House Committee on Science, Sherwood Boehlert (Republican, New York), warns of trouble ahead as NASA gears up to send astronauts back to the Moon. “A renaissance costs money, and I don't see any Medicis waiting in the wings to underwrite NASA,” he said in a 3 November hearing. “There is simply not enough money in NASA's budget to carry out all the tasks it is undertaking on the current schedule.”

Physicists, meanwhile, are livid over Congress's treatment of the Department of Energy's Office of Science. The office provides the lion's share of universities' physics research funding and maintains several large facilities.

The office's research and development budget did creep upwards 0.6% to $3.4 billion, but much of that money will go to congressionally mandated projects, such as a supercomputing centre for Oak Ridge National Laboratory in Tennessee. As a result, several core scientific fields funded by the department face cutbacks.

Hardest hit are the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider at Brookhaven National Laboratory in Upton, New York, and the CEBAF accelerator at the Thomas Jefferson National Accelerator Facility in Newport News, Virginia. Facing an 8.4% cut, the facilities may have to slash their operating time by up to 60%, warns Michael Lubell, director of public affairs at the American Physical Society. “Next year the department may have to seriously consider closing one of the two labs,” he says.

The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration fared a little better, seeing its research budget rise by 2.7% to $668 million. But most of that increase will be earmarked for an Alaskan fisheries programme. The National Institute of Standards and Technology saw its research budget drop by the same percentage, to $448 million. And its programme to fund high-risk research barely survived White House attempts to eliminate it, as the research budget for the Advanced Technology Program was slashed 43% to $65 million.

In July, Congress passed budgets for agencies including the Environmental Protection Agency and the US Geological Survey — both of which got tiny research increases that do not compensate for inflation. And October saw Congress slow the Department of Homeland Security's research budget to an increase of 4.1% after several years of explosive growth.

Lawmakers will now turn their attention to finishing the final budget bills, which will set funding for agencies such as the National Institutes of Health and the Department of Defense.

On top of these numbers, all federal agencies are expecting an across-the-board cut of 2% or more to help pay for military and disaster spending. “This is not the final number,” says Caroline McGuire, of the lobby group Lewis-Burke Associates in Washington DC. “There's another shoe to drop.”