OBAMA CRITICIZES SEQUESTER’S EFFECTS ON SCIENTIFIC R&D, INNOVATION

Tamar Hallerman
GHG Monitor
5/3/13

President Barack Obama this week criticized the impacts of the sequestration funding cuts on federally-funded R&D efforts, saying that scientific research should not be subject to the whims of Washington politics. “Right now, we’re on the brink of amazing breakthroughs that have the chance, the potential to change life for the better—which is why we can’t afford to gut these investments in science and technology,” Obama said in an April 29 speech marking the National Academy of Sciences’ 150th anniversary. “Unfortunately, that’s what we’re facing right now.”

Obama warned that research and technological innovation could fall behind by several years as a result of the “misguided” across-the-board cuts. Instead, he called for scaling up R&D work to rival spending during the space race in the 1950s and 1960s. “We’ve got to seize every opportunity we have to stay ahead. And we can’t let other countries win the race for ideas and technology of the future,” he said, touting recent research initiatives for developing electric vehicles, responding to climate change and making “solar energy as cheap as coal.” Obama vowed to “make sure that our scientific research does not fall victim to political maneuvers or agendas” that could impact scientific integrity and competitiveness.

Sequester Cut Most R&D Work by 5 Percent

Sequestration went into effect earlier this spring after Congress failed to agree on a solution to cut $1.5 trillion from the federal deficit over the next decade. The policy slashes 5 percent from most scientific research programs, but the White House said that because the cuts are being implemented over a seven-month period–instead of across an entire year–the impact on programs like the Department of Energy’s Fossil Energy R&D would be closer to 8.7 percent.

In a February letter to Senate appropriators, then-Secretary of Energy Steven Chu criticized the indiscriminate nature of the spending cuts. Instead, he called on Congress to authorize agency heads to move around funding within their respective budgets so they could prioritize some programs. “The effects of sequestration are particularly damaging because, by law, they apply equally to each program, project and activity within an account, thereby severely constraining our ability to prioritize and make tradeoffs among activities under reduced funding scenarios,” Chu told the Senate Appropriations Committee. “Being able to focus and prioritize funds and effort[s] in a reduced funding environment is critical to maintaining the human and physical capital needed to accomplish our mission; the way sequestration must be implemented withholds this essential discretion from my staff and me.”

‘A Friend in the White House’

Despite the cuts, multiple times during his 20-minute speech, Obama emphasized that he is a friend of scientific research. “What I want to communicate to all of you is that as long as I’m President, we’re going to continue to be committed to investing in the promising ideas that are generated from you and your institutions, because they lead to innovative products, they help boost our economy, but also because that’s who we are,” the President told the attendees. “You’ve got a strong supporter in the White House,” he added during his closing remarks.