In an article published this week in The Atlantic, directors from three national laboratories speak out on how cutting the meager amount the federal government spends on basic science would do little to meet short-term fiscal goals while incurring huge costs in the future.
Directors Paul Alivisatos of Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, Thom Mason of Oak Ridge National Laboratory and Eric D. Isaacs of Argonne National Laboratory note the sequester cuts will essentially put a freeze on basic research programs in the physical, biological, and computational sciences while the rest of the word races forward.
“Less than one percent of the federal budget goes to fund basic science research — $30.2 billion out of the total of $3.8 trillion President Obama requested in fiscal year 2012,” states the directors. “By slashing that fraction even further, the government will achieve short-term savings in millions this year, but the resulting gaps in the innovation pipeline could cost billions of dollars and hurt the national economy for decades to come.”
Read the article at The Atlantic: The Sequester Is Going to Devastate U.S. Science Research for Decades.