Washington

US science agencies will face a financial squeeze in 2005. The federal budget, passed by Congress on 20 November, provides little new money for research and imposes cuts on several agencies.

The Department of Homeland Security and the Pentagon are the only clear winners (see chart) — both receive a big increase to develop technologies to combat terrorism. The National Institutes of Health gets a mere 2% increase to $28.6 billion, well below the 15% increases it received annually between 1998 and 2003. Faring slightly better is the Department of Energy's science office, which sees a 2.8% increase to $3.6 billion. On the losing side is the Environmental Protection Agency, whose research budget falls 4.8% to $744 million.

Credit: SOURCE: AAAS

But the National Science Foundation (NSF) was by far the most disappointed — its budget will drop 1.9% to $5.5 billion next year. The decline, the agency's first since 1990, comes after several years of strong increases that science lobbyists had hoped would lead to a doubling of the foundation's budget. “I think various science coalitions are trying to scale down their expectations,” says Nadine Lymn, director of public affairs at the Ecological Society of America in Washington.

The NSF budget cuts result in part from President George W. Bush's plan to send astronauts to the Moon and eventually to Mars, says Michael Lubell, director of public affairs for the American Physical Society in Washington. That plan moved closer to reality last week, as NASA was granted its full request of $16.1 billion, up 4.5% from last year. The funding should allow NASA to stay on schedule and pick contractors in August to build the first major piece of hardware for this programme: a manned space vehicle that is expected to make a test flight in 2008.

Lubell sharply criticizes the decision to fund what he describes as a politically initiated project at the expense of peer-reviewed programmes at the NSF. And on 22 November, the American Physical Society issued a report warning that important projects could be delayed or cancelled as NASA prioritizes the Moon–Mars mission. “No one has laid out what the scientific benefits of this mission are going to be,” says Lubell.

Funding for a few specific science programmes is also significantly reduced. Most notably, a White House miscalculation led Congress to assign just $577 million to the construction of a nuclear-waste repository in Yucca Mountain, Nevada, well below the $880 million requested for the project for 2005 (see Nature 430, 820; 200410.1038/430820a).

Kei Koizumi, who directs the budget and policy programme at the American Association for the Advancement of Science in Washington, says tight years lie ahead for federal science agencies. The Bush administration is committed to halving the budget deficit by 2009, but it is still running up debt owing to recent tax cuts and military action in Iraq. “There's a lot of spending going on,” Koizumi says, so the money must come from cuts to domestic programmes, such as science.