Washington

Bare bones of the budget: Bush enlists support for his spending plans at Fernbank Museum in Atlanta. Credit: AP

The US National Institutes of Health (NIH) emerged as the sole winner among federal science agencies in President George W. Bush's first budget request to Congress last week. The request calls for an overall 4% increase in public spending to a record $1.96 trillion.

But several agencies, including the National Science Foundation (NSF), the Department of Energy (DoE), NASA and the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), are left with no increases — and in some cases reductions — in funding.

The NIH is in line for a large funding boost, as expected (see Nature 409, 969; 2001). Its requested 13.8% increase of $2.8 billion on its current budget of $20.3 billion leaves it on track to double its 1998 appropriation by 2003.

Disappointing for many: Bush's 2002 budget.

The NSF can only be envious. In September, Rita Colwell, the NSF's director, requested a 15% increase to the agency's $4.4 billion budget. But its ambitions to boost programmes in such areas as nanotechnology, terascale computers and earthquake simulation will be compromised by Bush's budget, which would provide only a 1.3% increase.

The DoE had also asked for a 15% increase on its $19.7 billion budget. Instead it faces a cut of 3.6%. Bush's 2002 blueprint also calls for increased spending on aid for energy-saving improvements to houses, tax credits for solar and renewable fuels, and some $275 million extra for stewardship of the nuclear weapons stockpile.

The DoE had hoped to increase grants to university researchers and to fund more users of facilities in high-energy and nuclear physics, materials sciences and fusion research, as well as expanding its genome and bioengineering research at Los Alamos and Brookhaven. The proposed budget reduction puts paid to such plans, and is likely to postpone refurbishment at ageing national laboratories such as Los Alamos and Oak Ridge.

But one senior DoE official insists that its pledges to Europe's Large Hadron Collider, the high-energy accelerators at Fermilab, Brookhaven and Stanford, and the Spallation Neutron Source under construction at Oak Ridge in Tennessee, will not be affected.

NASA, slated for a 2% increase to $14.5 billion, has been specifically told to cancel its Pluto–Kuiper Express and Solar Probe missions, largely to pay for overruns in the costs of the International Space Station, and to fund a more robust Mars exploration programme. Last week, the agency cancelled the X-33 experimental space plane after investing $1.3 billion over five years.

But the Bush budget statement is not the last word, says Representative Jim Walsh (Republican, New York), who chairs the House Appropriations Subcommittee. ”Ultimately, the Congress will decide what is spent, and that's how it should be.”