Washington

In a major boost for the physical sciences in the United States, Congress has passed a bill that recommends doubling the budget of the National Science Foundation (NSF) over the next five years.

Passage of the NSF Authorization Act of 2002, which President Bush is expected to sign before the end of the year, is seen as a historic landmark for the science agency, which supports most non-biomedical research at US universities, in disciplines ranging from computer science to geology.

Scientific societies have been eagerly pursuing such a measure for years, to match the doubling since 1998 of the budget of the main biomedical research agency, the National Institutes of Health (NIH). But it remains to be seen whether Congress will enact the 15% increases in the NSF's budget for each of the next five years recommended by the bill.

“Symbolically, this says there's bipartisan support for the NSF,” says Samuel Rankin, chair of Coalition for National Science Funding, an alliance of scientific societies that lobbies for NSF funding. Congressional appropriations committees, which actually allocate funds, have already decided to give the NSF a 12% increase for next year, bolstering the view that they are ready to support the agency's rapid expansion.

If the doubling does take place, disciplines that are likely to benefit include Earth sciences, mathematics, chemistry and computer science, which all rely heavily on the NSF for support. The agency also supports physics and biology, although the Department of Energy and the NIH, respectively, are far larger backers of these disciplines.

The doubling measure was welcomed by university physicists. “My hope is that this bill will allow the growth of new initiatives, while providing relief to ongoing programmes,” says Barry Barish, a physicist at the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena and a newly elected member of the National Science Board, the NSF's governing body.

The bill was championed by Sherwood Boehlert (Republican, New York), chair of the House Science Committee. In a change from earlier versions of the legislation, the fourth and fifth years of increases are contingent on a congressional review of the NSF's management practices. This modification was one of several made in late negotiations with the White House Office of Management and Budget, which had previously opposed the bill on the grounds that five years was too long for a funding commitment.

The measure also directs the NSF to prioritize its large infrastructure projects. The agency currently has around half a dozen such projects awaiting funding, with no clear order in which they are to start. This situation is frustrating to project advocates in Congress, as well as researchers, says Rankin.

Congress also passed a separate cyber-security bill that recommends spending almost $1 billion on computer security over five years, with half of the money going to the NSF. Gene Spafford, director of the Center for Education and Research in Information Assurance and Security at Purdue University in Indiana, says the cash would help research on the protection of advanced computer networks, and expand the number of doctorates issued in computer security.