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Trump, Congress approve largest U.S. research spending increase in a decade
- JustAnotherPat 9y agoAnd the trend continues in which science funding increases under Republican administrations more than it does under Democrat ones. For all their talk, it really is a disappointingly low priority for Democrats.
- tzs 9y agoIt's true that there is a weak correlation between the party of the administration and science funding, with funding being more under a Republican administration. However, there is also a correlation between the House of Representatives and science funding, with funding being more under a Democratic House of Representatives. (In the Senate, no correlation between party and funding) If you look at where the science spending goes, the Republican administrations spend more than Democrats largely because they spend more on the military, and so military funded science goes up. Democratic administrations spend less on the military, but more on space, energy, and environmental science. See: http://chicagopolicyreview.org/2015/11/09/do-democrats-always-spend-more-on-science-funding/ http://chicagopolicyreview.org/2015/11/09/do-democrats-alway...
- ModernMech 9y agoThis is true. A lot of my funding as a grad student in CS came from DARPA, which is part of the DOD.
- futurix 9y agoMost of the increase is due to Democrats.
- dashundchen 9y agoMostly because the Republicans cried crocodile tears about the deficit when a Democratic president was in office, but have no problem blowing up the deficit when a Republican is in office now or when Bush was in office. We're already over a trillion up in debt in the past year and trillions more expected for the tax giveaway in the next few years. And this is in good times when we should be paying down the debt, unlike the beginning of the decade when the US was in recession. I believe Republican obstruction of productive stimulus spending extended the recession longer than it needed to soley for political reasons. Mitch McConnell openly stated his main goal was to prevent Obama from being relected. I'm severely disappointed that most of this increased debt spending now is being forked over to a bloated black hole military budget. https://www.nytimes.com/2010/03/17/us/politics/17mcconnell.html?pagewanted=all https://www.nytimes.com/2010/03/17/us/politics/17mcconnell.h... https://m.washingtontimes.com/news/2018/mar/15/donald-trump-adds-1-trillion-national-debt-14-mont/ https://m.washingtontimes.com/news/2018/mar/15/donald-trump-...
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- gowld 9y agoCongress passes budgets, not the Administration (President). The current President loudly opposed the science funding increase before and after passage.
- softinio 9y agoThis is great news, but I bet you the media like CNN will still focus more on Stormy Daniels as clearly that is more important news :)
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- braderhart 9y agoPlease let me know when there is a blockchain election where I can monitor my votes in real time. Please let me know how I get a copy of my vote tallies today to ensure that it wasn't tampered with?
- braderhart 9y agoPlease let me know when the spending increase is on open source and open educational platforms to help fix generational poverty and socioeconomic issues caused by the stealing of the land and exploitation of minorities. Also, let's make sure to celebrate their attempts and help them restore God back into school, while we take away science and promote bullying on social media platforms.
- mendeza 9y agoThis is great, excited how the NIH got the most funding increase
- whatever_dude 9y agoPlease don't bring politics into HN.
- gowld 9y agoGovernment science funding is politics. Stormy Daniels' relation to the President is something else.
- seanmcdirmid 9y agoI’m sure it’s the same thing over at Fox, which we know has different biases than CNN. Media organization need to deliver an interesting product or they go bankrupt quickly.
- downrightmike 9y agoRemember that universities pay for the research to be created, but the researchers get to walk away and sell it. Really this is just helping turn more tax payer money into private wealth.
- noetic_techy 9y agoWhat exactly is your point? That research should stay cooped up in a lab?
- syshum 9y agoPublicly funded Research, should be Public Domain
- HarryHirsch 9y agoThe (undeveloped) argument seems to be that the costs for university research are borne by everyone (don't start about tuition) but only few people get to enjoy the fruits, and they get to do so disproportionately. A successful founder has wealth measured in tens of millions or even more (when Joe Schlessinger sold Plexxikon it was for 805 millions says Wikipedia), but any drug that falls out of it is expensive and might not be covered by your health insurance. This is a problem.
- HarryHirsch 9y agoBayh-Dole is more complex than that. The university gets a part of the proceeds if they manage to license the IP. More important: a university (or even a startup) do not at all have the means to take anything pharmaceutical through clinical testing, once it reaches Stage 2 it's up to Big Pharma, no one else has the means and the financial resources.
- rubidium 9y agoYou're mostly wrong. Any research done under a university usually includes at least a partial ownership of any patents or licensing by the university.
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- tlb 9y agoDARPA isn't mentioned, which I consider one of the most effective agencies. Is its budget elsewhere, like DOD?
- syshum 9y agoDARPA or the DEFENSE advance research projects Agency is part of the Dept. of DEFENSE so their budgeting is in the DOD budget
- tlb 9y agoIt does specifically mention the DOE Office of Science, which is part of the DOE budget, so they can apparently recurse beyond the top level.
- maxxxxx 9y agoI worked in a startup founded by DARPA people for a while and my impression was that DARPA is often used to funnel money to well connected friends. They do interesting things but it doesn't seem very efficient.
- throwaway84742 9y ago“Government is often used to funnel money to well connected friends” in general. DARPA is by no means unique in that regard. It is unique in that every 20 years or so it manages to crank out something that turns the world on its head.
- lazerpants 9y agoMy experience is quite different. DARPA is a good agency to work with for engineering seed funding in academic research. They're willing to fund some interesting ideas that other groups think are too risky.
- batbomb 9y agoDARPA is effective because, in many ways, it is sort of a research aggregator and packager, focusing basic research into solving specific problems. There's no HN without news elsewhere on the web, just like there's no DARPA without basic research in all the sciences. As such, it's budget should probably be somewhat proportional to the budget of basic research.
- mtgx 9y agoThis is all coming out of increased debt.
- nsnick 9y agoThe National Debt: Why Fret Over Something That Doesn't Exist? https://realmoney.thestreet.com/articles/10/25/2016/national-debt-why-fret-over-something-doesnt-exist https://realmoney.thestreet.com/articles/10/25/2016/national...
- liberte82 9y agoDidn’t Stalin declare all debt with the USSR null and void? I wouldn’t be shocked to see Trump do something like this one day.
- ska 9y agoThat would be a pretty good way to crash the economy, it's not a move to pull unless you are already in bad shape. Also bear in mind a lot of that debt is held by Americans...
- liberte82 9y agoYeah I don’t mean it’d happen tomorrow, but if things in the world continued to get a lot crazier.
- btilly 9y agoUnder Obama the idea was floated of creating very large amounts of money to fund the federal government. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trillion_dollar_coin https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trillion_dollar_coin for details.
- gowld 9y agoThat was an legal/accounting gimmick, underscored by the fiscal/economic point that minting a coin is fiscally equivalent to issuing debt.
- melling 9y agoHow would the world be different if the US spent more on research over the past 50 years? If the Human Genome Project had been completed in 1993 instead of 2003, for example, would our knowledge be 10-20 years ahead of where we are now? Knowledge we would be discovering 2038 might be discovered this year. If there is some sort of Moore’s Law for investment in research, by 2050, we’d have technology from 2150 at the current pace?
- weboxeh 9y agoScientific progress isn't in a 1:1 ratio with funding.
- no_identd 9y agoTrue, but misleading. On a local scale, the ratio seems significantly worse than 1:1. On a global scale, due to interdisciplinary synergies, it seems to exceed 1:1. I feel like one could draw some connection from this to the fact that technological progress seems to grow at a quadratic-hyperbolic (and not an exponential, as Ray Kurzweil would have you believe) rate, but alas, I can't think of a way to do so right now.
- ksk 9y ago>On a global scale, due to interdisciplinary synergies, it seems to exceed 1:1. How does it seem to do that? If you're going to call somebody misleading, might as well go through the effort of linking to data that you consider 'not misleading'.
- Brockenstein 9y agoI would have to argue that refinements to our processes for acquiring and sharing knowledge is probably a big player. Yes you need funding for research and more funding helps. More money isn't some sort of guarantee of results though. I would also have to argue that a lot of our technological progress comes from an existing infrastructure and incremental improvements. We have a lot of momentum driving rapid incremental improvements, money does sustain that system, but an infinite amount of money isn't going to yield infinite improvements. And simple more money isn't always going to yield multiples worth of improvements. One of the reason is some things just end up being dead ends. Or some other dependency doesn't exist yet. We've been making transistor, silicon based, x86 CPU's for 40+ years now. ARM is 33 years old. And we're just making improvements and refinements to those and to most technology for that matter. I would have to so the only thing that's growing at a quadratic-hyperbolic rate is adoption and application, not the technology itself.
- dspillett 9y agoWhere does this leave things relative to previous years? Does it completely counter any cuts made in recent times? Counter them over-all but still leave some areas under-/un- funded compared to a previous state of affairs?
- aaavl2821 9y agoFor NIH, this is massive. NIH lost 19% funding from 2003 (when it was at $40B / year) to 2015. Small gains the last couple years combined with this massive increase almost erases that (2018 budget is $38B). Pretty amazing
- no_identd 9y agoAnd when adjusted for inflation?
- ModernMech 9y agoTheir 2003 budget of $40B should be $54B in 2018 dollars.
- radicalbyte 9y agoThis is great news and all, but I thought that the administration wanted to slash research spending? Did they change plans, or is this how US politics works.
- rndmize 9y agoThe administration (ie. the Trump administration, ie. the executive branch) has no control over spending and the president's budget is more of a wishlist than anything else. Congress sets the budget and passes the bill(s) that fund it.
- deciplex 9y agoThis is the budget that Trump threatened to veto and whined and complained about before he signed, and the one they're writing articles about the Democrats getting heaps of stuff they wanted in it. I don't think it should be taken as an indication of stuff Trump wants, and to some extent the same goes for the GOP.
- maxxxxx 9y agoIt definitely shows that his "deal making" abilities are not as great as he thinks.
- kevindong 9y agoThis is how US politics work. The current president makes a proposal on how they would like for the budget to look, but it's just a proposal. The legislative branch (Congress) is actually responsible for creating the budget. They are not at all obligated to follow the proposal. The president has to agree to the budget submitted to him by Congress, so there's usually a lot of discussions between the two parties. The caveat here is that Congress can override a presidential veto.
- learc83 9y agoHere is Trump's tweet on what he thinks of the domestic spending increase. "Got $1.6 Billion to start Wall on Southern Border, rest will be forthcoming. Most importantly, got $700 Billion to rebuild our Military, $716 Billion next year...most ever. Had to waste money on Dem giveaways in order to take care of military pay increase and new equipment." (emphasis mine)
- _bxg1 9y ago"$700 Billion to rebuild our Military" ...because, as everyone knows, the US military is in shambles compared to the rest of the world...
- maxerickson 9y agoThey are stretched thin relative to the mission they are being asked to carry out. (I'm not trying to weigh in on the politics, just pointing out one context where that remark makes sense)
- prolikewhoa 9y agoDoes it really cost this much money to destroy the world though?
- nwsm 9y agoCute
- GCU-Empiricist 9y agoDestroy, no that's a lot cheaper. Remain capable of fighting two major wars at any given time, that's more expensive I think they reduced the policy level capability requirement to one major war and something smaller within the last two years. Source was a naval officer, still keep up with the professional journals.
- sambull 9y agoWhat is their mission?
- birken 9y agoI'll just note from a political perspective, Donald Trump threatened to veto the final budget bill because of the totality of these spending increases. He was not in favor of these increases. In fact the budget Donald Trump proposed [1] mainly was massive increases in military spending with sharp cuts to many domestic agencies (EPA -25%, Education -5%), including many research agencies they don't agree with (like the NOAA [2]). But what happened is many Republicans in the freedom caucus refused to vote for a budget that increased the debt by so much, so a compromise was required as Democratic votes were going to be needed. So to vastly oversimplify, Republicans wanted higher military spending, Democrats wanted higher domestic spending, and the compromise was reached that everybody got everything and who cares about the national debt. The bill actually passed in a very bipartisan way, with 62% of republicans and 59% of democrats in the House voting for the final bill, but with many of the "no" votes for different reasons (no DACA solution, debt increase too much, not enough wall spending, etc). So while these increases are good (if you happen to like R&D spending), they aren't due to congress shifting their spending priorities, they are just due to a massive increase in the debt. 1: https://www.washingtonpost.com/graphics/2018/politics/trump-budget-2019/?utm_term=.1b35d6134447 https://www.washingtonpost.com/graphics/2018/politics/trump-... 2: https://www.aip.org/fyi/2017/trump-budget-cuts-noaa-16-slashes-research-funding-even-deeper https://www.aip.org/fyi/2017/trump-budget-cuts-noaa-16-slash...
- gowld 9y agoIn other words, at the end of the day, traditional hog-trading politics as usual (going back 30+ years), for better or for worse, which frankly is a bit refreshing in the context of the other insanity flying around national politics this year.
- maxxxxx 9y ago"who cares about the national debt" This can easily be fixed with some more tax cuts if you believe the GOP.
- r00fus 9y agoIt's Laffer curves all the way down with them.
- cvaidya1986 9y agoHopefully everyone sees this as the positive news it is. US research is it’s greatest asset.