Bush's budget offers good, bad news
By Cynthia Lee
Staff Writer
The news is both cheery and sobering for those at UCLA who are assessing President Bush’s budget request for 2007 to see whether more funding will be available in their area of research.
Under the new American Competitiveness Initiative to make the country more competitive in the global marketplace, Bush wants to provide $136 billion over the next decade to help the nation regain its shaky footing in math and science. Roughly $50 billion would go to the National Science Foundation (NSF), the Office of Science in the Department of Energy and the Department of Commerce’s National Institute of Standards and Technology. For 2007, Bush wants to add $910 million to their budgets.
“This is clearly very good news for the physical sciences and engineering,” said Vice Chancellor for Research Roberto Peccei. “Funding for both these areas has been pretty much flat for a long, long time.”
But not all the news in Bush’s budget proposal was encouraging. Funding for the NIH remains flat — “It’s not even keeping up with inflation,” said Kim Savage, UCLA’s executive director of federal relations. The campus gets about 65% of its federal research dollars from this agency. Funding for NASA is also anemic.
While in Washington, D.C., recently, Peccei attended a talk by Senator Lamar Alexander (R-Tenn.), the heads of the NSF and Department of Energy, and John H. Marburger III, the president’s chief science adviser. “The message was uniform — it is very important to put money into these areas if we as a nation are to remain competitive,” said Peccei. “All of this is very positive for UCLA.”
One center that may benefit from a substantial increase in funding is UCLA’s Institute for Digital Research and Education. Bush also is adding funding for fusion energy research and alternative fuels, areas in which UCLA researchers are very active.
“But all this has to be tempered by the fact that the NIH budget is flat,” Peccei said. “And these are very diffficult financial times.”
Bush also wants funds to train 70,000 teachers for Advanced Placement math and science classes in high schools and retrain 30,000 math and science professionals as teachers.
“The competitiveness initiative shows that the president is paying attention to what industry, universities and academics are saying,” Savage said.
Last October, the National Academy of Sciences and the National Academy of Engineering released a hard-hitting report, “Rising Above the Gathering Storm,” warning that America’s ability to compete would continue to erode unless the government invests $10 billion over seven years to bolster math and science education.
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