It wasn’t so long ago that Congress passed and Bush signed the America COMPETES act (I’m sure COMPETES is some big acronym for a goofy-sounding title, but I’m too lazy to look it up).  Anyways, this was supposed to be some big new initiative to reinvigorate America, to develop the areas that need developing to ensure America is competitive.  One of the main aspects of this act was to increase the funding for both science and science education.

Well, initiatives like this are useless if they aren’t funded.  Congress just passed a budget, which Bush signed.  Bush had threatened to veto it if it wasn’t under a certain amount.  Well, the only way to get it under that amount and to pay for the wars was to cut a lot of stuff, including science funding.  America COMPETES is essentially an unfunded mandate.  As a result, the skills necessary to ensure that America will be competitive in the future will not be honed; the innovations needed to keep America at the forefront of science will not be developed;  the discoveries that America is known for — and has won so many Nobel prizes for — will not be found.

It seems to me that this is one of the biggest casualties of the two wars.  (This and the loss of liberties for the sake of security, but that is another story.)  The US is already losing ground, due to, amongst other things, the reduction in foreign graduate students in our universities (because of increased immigration difficulties).  In the long run, America will be safer, possibly, but we will also be more mediocre.

And a personal note related to this.  I, with some colleagues, had a proposal pending for the Office of Basic Energy Science’s (BES) call on Advanced Nuclear Energy Systems (ANES).  This was a proposal we submitted about this time last year.  As a result of the reduced funding for science, all of BES’s open solicitations were closed and all proposals currently pending were effectively killed.  This was not only for the ANES call, but also the Instrumentation, Solar, and Hydrogen calls.  To give some perspective on how much time was effectively wasted, then, on just the ANES call, each national laboratory was allowed to submit 4 proposals to BES.  Lets say 10 of the labs submitted the maximum number of proposals, so about 40 proposals.  A proposal takes quite a lot of time to write.  I personally spent the better part of two weeks working on ours, and others on our team spent considerable time as well.  So, lets say 5 people spending about 50-80 hours each, so 250-400 hours.  If you consider all 40 proposals, that is between 1 and 2 complete years of effort nation-wide.  Already, we were competing for a small pot of money ($8 million, which seems like a lot, but when you consider each proposal is for $1.5-$3 million, it means only 3-6 proposals would be funded).  So, our expectations weren’t necessarily great, but at least there was a shot.  But, now, since the call is dead, there is absolutely nothing to show for that proposal.  Or any of the proposals that were written.

Thus, as a result of the cuts, not only is America as a whole going to be significantly less competitive that we might have been, but a lot of us have wasted a lot of time with nothing to show for it.