Well, remember that the chart was "change in percentage of GDP". GDP is fairly large, and scientific funding is fairly small relative to that, so the change in

Well, remember that the chart was "change in percentage of GDP". GDP is fairly large, and scientific funding is fairly small relative to that, so the change in the percentage of GDP is going to be a fairly small value. The US's GDP is $14.99 trillion; so a -.05% change in scientific funding represents a change of about $7.5 billion, while in the meantime, China had an increase in scientific funding of close to the same amount (.1% of their GDP is $7.3B). Now, they don't say how much that is relative to what the US or China spend overall on science. But still, that's a fairly big change either way. If you take a look at the linked report http://www.asbmb.org/uploadedFiles/Advocacy/Events/UPVO%20Report.pdf http://www.asbmb.org/uploadedFiles/Advocacy/Events/UPVO%20Re..., it's even worse if you expand the time scale. Between 2010 and the estimated spending for 2013, there's a drop of more than $20B in scientific funding, from nearly $160B to less than $140B. That's a noticeable change; and based on the percent GDP figure, it's not just because the economy has been down, it's gone down more than the economy as a whole. In fact, in constant dollars, taking inflation into account, funding has been declining since 2004, as funding levels were stagnant for a while and not keeping up with inflation. Now they are actively declining.