Scalpel or guillotine? Those are the possible fates in store for US science funding after Congress and the White House reached a deal to cut federal spending and raise the nation's self-imposed debt limit before a 2 August deadline.
The product of tumultuous negotiations, the deal largely spares science in the short term but puts a day of reckoning on the horizon: 2 January 2013. If politicians cannot agree on how to improve the government's fiscal outlook by then through targeted cuts and other means--the scalpel option--their failure will automatically trigger the guillotine: a deep cut applied across a range of expenditures, including research. In the worst case, the automatic cuts could mean shuttered laboratories and mass lay-offs at universities.
Whether or not that happens depends partly on a special Joint Select Committee on Deficit Reduction, the 'super-committee', to be set up as part of the deal. The super-committee, which congressional leaders must appoint by 16 August, will be charged with finding ways of raising revenues or reducing the costs of entitlement programs such as health care and social security, which the government is legally required to fund. If the super-committee fails, the automatic triggers would force discretionary spending to fall under the indiscriminate blade of across-the-board cuts.
"Then there will be extraordinary pain," says Michael Lubell, director of public affairs for the American Physical Society in Washington DC. "And it will get worse in 2014."
This is not only a disgraceful situation, but a real danger to national security. To read the rest of the article, click here.