It looks like Bush is planning more money for basic sciecnce! This is a great thing. Science… and more importantly basic research has been struggling lately. At NIST a lot of the research is no longer focus on basic research issues. Instead scientist are stuck chasing the topics that can bring in money. This means that they get to publish less papers and makes it tougher to follow interesting, and promising topics.
It looks like there is a chance for this to change though. In Bush’s state of the union address he promised more money for science in the “American Competitive Initiative”. A description from the Post:
“Now the president will ask Congress to increase spending on federal research and development next year by nearly $6 billion, to a level that would be more than 50 percent higher than the level he inherited in 2001. Under the initiative, the budgets of the NSF, the Energy Department’s Office of Science, and the Commerce Department’s National Institute of Standards and Technology would double over 10 years, with $50 billion in new funding.”