Now you see it… now you don’t

By Hamish Johnston

UPDATE 11 February: Things have moved on in Washington and according to ScienceDebate2008 the US Senate has restored $3.1 billion in proposed cuts to science-related spending in the president’s stimulus package. You can see a comparison of the Senate’s proposal and the House of Representatives’ spending plans for science here.

I just received an email from the folks at ScienceDebate2008, claiming that a US senate committee has suggested significant cuts to Barack Obama’s $825bn economic stimulus package.

And it doesn’t look good for science — with all the extra money for the National Science Foundation (NSF) and the Department of Energy Office of Science included in the cuts.

ScienceDebate2008 (they really need to update their name) says the cuts are as follows, the percentage referring to the amount first proposed by the president.

NASA exploration $750,000,000 = 50%
NSF $1,402,000,000 = 100%
NOAA $427,000,000 = 34.94%
NIST $218,000,000 = 37.91%
DOE energy efficiency & renewable energy $1,000,000,000 = 38%
DOE office of science $100,000,000 = 100%

The political website Talking Points Memo has posted a detailed list of all the proposed cuts here apparently they total $77.9bn.