Good News for Science Budgets?

President Bush has released his fiscal-year 2009 budget request and it contains good news for science funding. The President's budget request contains:

• A 13.7% increase in research funding for the NSF, which will primarily go to research grants and graduate fellowships.
• A modest 1.7% + inflation increase in the budget for NASA's science mission directorate.
• A 16.8% increasing in funding for the DOE's office of science. This includes a 17.9% increase in funding for nuclear physics and a 72% increase in funding for fusion research.

Overall, the request looks positive, however last year's request was similarly positive, as was the budget initially passed by Congress and we all know how that turned out (see my previous post here). In an election year with the threat of an economic recession on the horizen, nothing is certain, but at least the request looks good. Here's to hoping that the actual budget has half the increases in the request.

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On a side note, for the first time, the White House did not print copies of the budget request and instead issued a pdf file. The FY2008 budget request was over 2000 pages long and even my 74 year-old grandma has been using pdf's for the better part of a decade, so one has to wonder what took them so long?

I'd like to be the first to welcome our government documents to the year 1997. You're only a decade behind and with your continued hard work, someday you might just get to within a few years of the present. Keep it up!