Show us the money!
We have always sought out new frontiers and this generation is no different. Today’s frontiers can’t be found on a map. They’re being explored in our classrooms and our laboratories, in our start-ups and our factories. And today’s pioneers are not traveling to some far flung place. These pioneers are all around us — the entrepreneurs and the inventors, the researchers, the engineers — helping to lead us into the future, just as they have in the past. This is the nation that has led the world for two centuries in the pursuit of discovery.
-President Barack Obama, Energy Speech at MIT October 23, 2009
As a candidate for President and throughout President Obama’s first year he has established himself as a friend of the scientific community. He has made many statements like the one above poignantly establishing the importance of innovation and scientific discovery in our nation’s goals. However, supportive statements don’t pay the bills and as I’ve had reiterated to me several times during my conversations with various professors at graduate school interviews; funding is king. Ultimately, the best way for President Obama to demonstrate his support of the sciences is to show us the money. He started off on the right foot with the science funding handed out in the stimulus package last year. The chart below illustrates President Obama’s proposed budgetary changes.
Minus the small decrease in funding for the CDC, many scientific organizations could potentially see sizable increases in funding. As I’ll be starting my graduate work in biosciences next fall I’m extremely happy to see the proposed increases. I’m quite surprised to see a reduction in funds budgeted to the CDC after the recent swine flu outbreak. However, the overall increase in funding is a huge step forward compared to the prior administration. Hopefully Congress will pass a budget with increases similar to the President’s proposed budget. These funds could be used to improve the financial status of many labs across the country that were affected by declining funding availability. I’ve got my fingers crossed that President Obama will continue supporting the sciences in not just his speeches but in his actions as well.