ScienceInsider

by Jeffrey Mervis

Senator Tom Coburn (R–OK) finally got his long-awaited roll-call vote last night to strip out political science research from the 2010 budget of the National Science Foundation. And while his amendment was soundly defeated, 36 to 62, it wasn't strictly a party-line vote. Five moderate Democrats—Senators Max Baucus of Montana, Evan Bayh of Indiana, Claire McCaskill of Missouri, Ben Nelson of Nebraska, and Jim Webb of Virginia—apparently agree with Coburn's argument that NSF, with a budget of $6.9 billion, is "wasting" federal dollars by spending $9 million a year to support research in the field.

"I have no way to explain it," says Michael Brintnall, executive director of the American Political Science Association, which has been following the issue closely. "We'd never heard that they had any concerns about funding this type of research."

The amendment came as the Senate cleared a $65-billion spending bill that funds multiple agencies, including NSF, NASA, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, and the National Institute of Standards and Technology. The next step is to resolve differences between its version and the one passed this summer by the House of Representatives. Congress has completed work on only four of 12 spending bills for the fiscal year that began on 1 October. The rest of the government is covered by a continuing resolution, holding spending at 2009 levels, that expires on 18 December.

by Erik Stokstad

Congress wants the Department of Interior to figure out what it doesn't know about Arctic ecosystems in order to better plan for oil and gas exploration. Tucked into a House-Senate conference report (pdf) for the fiscal year 2010 Interior/Environment spending bill is language (after the jump) suggesting that the DOI's Mineral Management Service get an independent assessment (i.e. by the National Research Council) of data gaps about the biodiversity and functioning of coastal and marine ecosystems. There's no money provided.

Conservationists are happy about the call, but realistic. "They're only identifying the gaps, not filling them," says Stan Senner of Ocean Conservancy in Washington, D.C. "We can all acknowledge the need for more science guide all the decisions" that will need to be made about development.

Photo Credit: http://www.flickr.com/photos/artic/ / CC BY-SA 2.0

by Jocelyn Kaiser

The results are in for National Institutes of Health's much-discussed Challenge Grants, and the news is only slightly better than expected: The agency funded 840 projects, which puts the portion of the mind boggling 20,000-plus applications funded at around 4%. That's abysmal compared with the usual NIH grant success rate of around 20%. But it beats the 1%–2% (200–400 grants) that NIH originally said it would fund.

The data come from a preliminary report on how NIH spent the first half of its $10.4 billion from the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act. The tally comes to 12,788 grants funded for $4.35 billion in 2009. (Contracts add another $379 million.) Grant categories include previously reviewed proposals that just missed the cutoff for funding from NIH's regular budget, as well as extensions of existing projects (supplements and revisions). The dollar breakdown (see chart): $1.51 billion (34.7%) to administrative supplements, $1.43 billion (32.9%) to previously reviewed applications,  $1.15 billion (26.4%) to stimulus competitions, $218 million (5%) to competing revisions, and $45 million (1%) to summer supplements.

The Department of Energy and EPA are partnering to fix the broken Energy Star Program.

Senate Judiciary Chair Patrick Leahy (D–VT) wants to work with Majority Leader Harry Reid (D–NV) to schedule debate on the stalled patent reform bill before the end of the year.

Johns Hopkins University tops NSF's R&D rankings for 2006–08.

NIH Director Francis Collins has been named by Pope Benedict XVI to the Pontifical Academy of Sciences.

For the second straight running of the DOE's Solar Decathlon, a German team has brought home the gold.

A budget crunch at the Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory has led the lab to cancel its yearly open house to the public.

by Jeffrey Mervis

Senator Tom Coburn (R–OK) has long been a critic of the National Science Foundation's funding of the political and social sciences, believing that the research it supports is more political than scientific. But the conservative Republican couldn't have picked a worse time to make his argument.

On Tuesday, Coburn proposed eliminating from NSF's 2010 budget the $9 million a year that NSF spends on political science within its $240-million-a-year directorate for social, behavioral, and economic sciences. Coburn singled out a study of campaign rhetoric to accuse NSF of paying for the obvious. "We know why politicians make vague statements," he thundered. "Because they don’t want to get pinned down. But most important, they want to get reelected or elected." He was equally dismissive of research that he described as asking "why people are for or against military conflicts." As he put it, "for us to send money to study something that stupid … is beyond me."

But Senator Barbara Mikulski (D–MD), chair of the spending panel that sets NSF's budget, was well-prepared to defend the $6.5 billion agency. "I wish to bring to [Coburn's] attention the fact that Dr. Elinor Ostrom, who just won the Nobel Prize for economics, is a political scientist. She has received most of her funding from NSF—28 grants since 1974." Mikulski also defended a joint program with the Department of Defense in which NSF just awarded $8 million in grants to study the social science dimensions of national security, conflicts, and cooperation. "If one of those studies helps one policymaker make one decision to save one Marine, [then] I think it is worth the 8 million bucks."

Coburn admits that his cause is doomed—"I do not have any illusions about what is going to happen"—and his amendment is not expected to be taken up next week when the Senate resumes debate on the spending bill. But Mikulski wasn't in a forgiving mood. "I don't like targeting an individual science area … or trivializing academic research," she said. "The National Science Foundation and our other scientific institutions must go where no thought has gone before. That is the point of discovery."

by Eli Kintisch

Ocean-research advocates are rallying the troops today to build opposition to a proposed $172 million cut from the 2010 budget of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration as part of debate on the $65 billion Commerce, Justice, and Science spending bill for next year. Texas Senator Kay Bailey Hutchinson (R) and three other Republicans have proposed cutting that money from the NOAA operating account and using it to fund the "State Criminal Alien Assistance Program," which the Obama Administration wants to slash from the budget next year. The program provides federal funds to state and local jails to help them pay for detention of criminals who are undocumented immigrants, and the Obama Administration said it would save $400 million by cutting it from the federal budget.

by Elisabeth Pain

First impressions can be deceiving. The 2010 science budget the Spanish Science and Innovation Ministry presented to Parliament last week has now spread concern and uncertainty among the Spanish scientific community. In an open letter published a couple of days later in the national newspaper El País, 51 biomedical investigators declared their "enormous perplexity and confusion" at what some perceive as a breach of the government's pledge to promote science and a knowledge-based economy.

by Andrey Allakhverdov and Vladimir Pokrovsky

Last Friday, in the leading Moscow business newspaper Vedomosti, a letter addressed to Russia’s president and its prime minister and signed by more than 100 Russian researchers who permanently work abroad complained of “the disastrous situation in the Russian basic research,” noting extremely low levels of funding and a continuing massive brain drain. “We certainly hope to draw the attention of the political leadership of the country to the dangers of neglecting fundamental science and education,” says Andrei Starinets, a physicist at the University of Oxford in the United Kingdom and an author of the letter. “It takes years before investments in fundamental science and education pay off. These issues therefore require strategic rather than tactical thinking.”

The letter hasn’t drawn any official response so far, but Russian officials this week boasted about their support of science, particularly a new program to lure back 100 expat researchers to work at least 2 months a year in a Russian research institute or university. “The process of return of researchers to Russia will become avalanche-like in the nearest future,” said the minister of science and education Andrey Fursenko at the Second International Nanotechnology Forum which has just closed in Moscow.

by Eli Kintisch

The U.S. House of Representatives has approved a $33.5 billion spending bill for energy and water spending in fiscal year 2010, and Senate action could come next week. In the joint House-Senate spending bill that was hammered out yesterday, Department of Energy's Office of Science, which supports most U.S. physical science, was awarded a 2.7% boost.

From the press release:

Office of Science: $4.9 billion, $131 million above 2009, for scientific research critical to addressing long-term energy needs. This funding, in addition to the $4.8 billion appropriated in fiscal year 2009 and $1.6 billion in the Recovery Act, exceeds the goals in the America COMPETES Act.

by Barbara Casassus

PARIS—Higher education and research are one of the few budgetary bright spots on a landscape of gloom in France, as the economic crisis is predicted to push the country’s public deficit to a record high next year.

Valérie Pécresse, the higher education and research minister here, told reporters Thursday that her portfolio in the French draft budget for 2010, unveiled Wednesday, was “the top priority for the 3rd year running.” Earmarked spending for her realm is up, including inflation, 5.3%, to €29.2 billion from this year’s €27.7 billion, and should be the “springboard for the (economic) recovery,” she said.