Liberal Values Defending Liberty and Enlightened Thought

Barack Obama’s proposed freeze on discretionary spending would be better described as a cap than a freeze. I suspect they are using the term “freeze” because it is more easily understood.  A cap would be a better description as instead of freezing each item in the budget subjected to the freeze there is a total cap on such expenditures. Within this limit money can  be shifted from one department to another. Increases in one area are offset by decreases elsewhere.

This means that despite a freeze there will be winners and losers. Overall spending on science is being improved. Science Insider has described some of the increases in the proposed 2011 budget:

• A $1 billion increase, to $32.1 billion, for the National Institutes of Health. That 3%-plus boost is aimed at keeping NIH on pace with inflationary costs for doing biomedical research.
• A $550 million boost, to $7.4 billion, for the National Science Foundation. Almost all of that 8% increase would go to NSF’s six research directorates, with a special emphasis on clean energy and sustainability. Its education and training programs would rise by 2%.
• A $226 million hike, to $5.1 billion, for the Office of Science within the Department of Energy (DOE). The department’s 3-year-old effort to jump-start a low-carbon economy, the Advanced Research Projects Agency-Energy, would get $300 million as its first annual budget. A scaled-down education and training initiative, RE-ENERGYSE, would get $74 million, after Congress rejected a much larger program proposed last year.
• A $540 million boost, to $5 billion, for science programs within NASA. The increase comes as part of the Administration’s proposed reshuffling of priorities on human space exploration. That plan includes a heavy-lift rocket for exploration beyond the moon and the commercial sector taking on responsibility for getting astronauts to the low-Earth-orbit international space station.
• A $164 million jump, to $429 million, in the competitively awarded research programs at the U.S. Department of Agriculture.
• A $67 million increase, to $587 million, for the basic science programs at the National Institute of Standards and Technology.