Many of the budget bills advancing in Congress push back on the Trump administration’s drive for huge cuts to science agencies, but the endgame is still far from clear.
On a bipartisan basis, the Senate has proposed roughly level funding for the National Science Foundation, NASA’s science arm, and the National Institutes of Health, in stark contrast to the administration’s call to cut each in the range of 40% to 60%. However, the House has entertained some of the administration’s science cuts. House Republicans have advanced legislation proposing to cut NSF and NASA science by around 20%, for instance.
There are also budget hawks in the Senate. The chamber has yet to release its spending proposal for the Department of Energy, reportedly because its lead appropriator for DOE is pushing for cuts. Conversely, the lead DOE appropriator in the House is pushing for a slight increase to the DOE Office of Science, breaking with the 14% cut requested by the administration.
The next fiscal year starts Oct. 1, leaving only a few weeks of legislative time to hammer out a deal. If history is any guide, it is virtually certain that Congress will not reach an agreement before the deadline. It has been nearly three decades since the Congress last completed the process on time.
Instead, Congress will likely either pass a stopgap to buy time for more negotiations or trigger a government shutdown. While the use of stopgaps has become routine, under the Trump administration that path presents new risks.
Some media reports suggest that the White House Office of Management and Budget will push agencies to operate under the spending levels proposed under the president’s budget request while Congress debates the final appropriation levels. OMB could use this as a pretext for further rounds of layoffs.
While this threat could compel Congress to act more quickly, the political hurdles are daunting. Congress had such difficulty reaching a final agreement in the previous appropriations cycle that it resorted to a full year stopgap, which kept agency budgets at roughly the same level as the year before.
For details on agency-specific proposals to date, consult FYI’s Federal Science Budget Tracker.