From the Editor
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“Most things may never happen,” Philip
Larkin wrote, and presidential budget requests never pass unaltered, even
when one party controls the executive and legislative branches of government. Congress is jealous of its power
to appropriate, and legislators fight to
protect programs important to their districts. “America First: A Budget Blueprint to Make America Great Again,”
released in March, isn’t even a presidential budget request. It’s a sketch,
lacking details, of the priorities of the
administration of Donald Trump, and
an opening bid in the art of the deal. But
the blueprint eloquently expresses the
things the White House cares about, and
federal funding of science and technology isn’t among them.
The blueprint proposes that the
National Institutes of Health should
lose $6 billion, or over 18 percent of its
budget, and the Department of Energy’s
O;ce of Science $900 million, or nearly
20 percent of its funding. The White
House wants a 40 percent reduction in
science programs at the Environmen-
tal Protection Agency, and a 26 percent
reduction in research at the National
Oceanic and Atmospheric Adminis-
tration. Oddly, the National Science
Foundation and its $7.5 billion budget
aren’t mentioned, nor are the Defense
Advanced Research Projects Agency
(DARPA) and its nearly $3 billion bud-
get. Perhaps the formal presidential
budget request, due in May, will be more
specific. But the White House is clear
enough about the Advanced Research
Projects Agency–Energy (ARPA-E),
a small agency with $300 million in
appropriations that has developed
energy technologies such as advanced
batteries: it should be eliminated,
because “the private sector is better
positioned to finance disruptive energy
research and development and to com-
mercialize innovative technologies.”
Whence this passion for culling sci-
ence and technology budgets? Some
part must be bluntly mathematical:
the blueprint vows to increase defense
spending by $54 billion while leav-
ing Social Security and Medicare
untouched, all without increasing the
federal deficit. Something had to give,
and the NIH was the loser. The punish-
ment delivered to the EPA and NOAA
doubtless derives from the administra-
tion’s derisive attitude toward climate
science (which Mick Mulvaney, the
director of the O;ce of Management
and Budget, has called a “waste of your
money” and the president has called a
“hoax”). But why eliminate ARPA-E and
reduce DOE’s spending by so much?
To a remarkable degree, the White
House’s blueprint cribs from a “Blueprint
for Balance” published by the conserva-
tive Heritage Foundation last year. Heri-
tage’s plan also calls for the elimination
of ARPA-E, and in strikingly similar lan-
guage. It castigates the DOE because its
Make America Great Again
The president’s proposed cuts to research funding would cripple American
innovation. We should be spending more on R&D, not less.
Trump’s best policy would
be to return funding of R&D
to the scale it enjoyed
during the 1960s, when the
U.S. spent more than the
rest of the world combined.
