President Joe Biden released his latest budget request to Congress on 28 March, calling for significant new investments in clean energy and public health in the United States. The proposal for fiscal year 2023 includes roughly US$200 billion for research and development programmes, according to the American Association for the Advancement of Science in Washington DC. It comes just weeks after Congress finalized a spending package for the current fiscal year that cut back considerably on the science funds that Biden had requested — signaling more challenges ahead.
Although Congress modestly increased funding for most science agencies in 2022, it heavily scaled back some of the administration’s most ambitious proposals. For instance, the Advanced Research Projects Agency-Health (ARPA-H), a new high-risk, high-reward agency meant to accelerate innovations in health and medicine, received $1 billion rather than the $6.5 billion the president requested last year.
“The President’s request is certainly very solid, and the increases for science go right across the board,” says Michael Lubell, a physicist at the City College of New York who tracks federal science-policy issues. But Lubell says concerns about the rising cost of living for Americans owing to inflation, as well as economic uncertainty around the invasion of Ukraine, could make it hard for Biden’s party, the Democrats, to boost government spending on anything, without also putting new taxes in place to increase revenue. “Science is one of the least contentious issues,” Lubell adds, “but it’s not something that puts food on the table tomorrow.”
