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Enormous political pressure to reduce government expenditure has forced
President Clinton to propose the lowest level of government-funded research
in almost forty years. But Clinton is claiming exactly the opposite.

The President’s proposed budget for 1995, unveiled last week, appears
to increase spending on science by 3 per cent, to $73 billion. Invoking
a favourite Clinton buzzword, his senior aides announced that the extra
money would pay for ‘investments’ in technological advances that the country
needs for future economic growth.

But the details of Clinton’s proposal show that his science budget continues
a steady slide in spending on research and development when viewed as a
proportion of the US economy. That slide has continued for three decades.
In 1995, Clinton proposes to spend 0.992 per cent of GDP on R&D. That
is a drop from 1.09 per cent in 1993 and 1.03 per cent in 1994 – and a far
cry from the 1960s when the government spent more than 2 per cent on R&D.

Clinton says the budget will ‘stake out an American position in the
new technologies of the 21st century’, by providing funds to convert defence
projects to civilian purposes and to build new computer networks known as
information superhighways.

‘It’s a very future-oriented budget,’ says Alice Rivlin, deputy director
of the budget office, which oversees spending by all federal agencies.

George Brown, chairman of the House of Representatives science committee,
points out that although Clinton claims to be harnessing science to the
needs of industry, his science budget for 1995 would be smaller than in
any year since 1958.

The proposed budget, says Brown, shows that ‘science, space and technology
programmes – whose payoffs, no matter how valuable, tend to be longer term
and intangible in the near term – are particularly vulnerable to short-sighted
budget-cutting efforts’.

Brown is also concerned that Congress may refuse to spend as much money
as the President has requested, as it often has in the past.

The details of Clinton’s budget support another of Brown’s complaints
– that it still puts too much emphasis on military projects. Under the most
optimistic interpretation, in which Pentagon projects with civilian applications
are counted as civilian programmes, military research would receive 53 per
cent of the total research budget, the same as in 1994.

John Gibbons, the president’s science adviser, points out that the
Pentagon’s slice of the pie was reduced slightly in last year’s budget.
And although no further reduction is being made in 1995, another cutback
is planned for 1996. By 1997, the government’s research money will be evenly
split between military and civilian projects.

Despite the criticisms, the administration insists that it has protected
science. In preparing his $1.5 trillion budget for the entire government,
Clinton was required by a new law to limit the government’s 1995 deficit
to $176 billion, almost halving the deficit that had been planned. That
forced him to cancel or reduce funding for a variety of government programmes
– making the ‘increase’ in science funding all the more notable.

‘Any increases we make have to come at the cost of something else,’
says Gibbons. Some science projects were cut back or cancelled to release
funds for other science projects. Those casualties include a new rocket
motor for the space shuttle, a new system for separating isotopes of uranium,
and aeronautical research. The budget also calls for the first cut in NASA’s
budget allocation since 1974, after the Apollo Moon exploration programme
ended.

Much of the extra money is being funnelled into the current administration’s
pet projects, such as global change research, development of environmental
technologies, and development of renewable energy sources.

This means that agencies involved in favoured areas of research are
in line for the biggest increases. For example, the National Institute
of Standards and Technology, which develops industrial technologies, is
marked out for a 78 per cent increase. The agriculture department, by contrast,
will receive no increase at all.