Anyone who thought that Washington had got the message about the importance of science funding, and had reached a bipartisan consensus on long-term federal investment in research, will have received a rude awakening in these few past weeks, as the US House of Representatives has considered the appropriations bills that will fund government spending in the next fiscal year.

The House appropriations bills, which are being drawn up under tight ‘spending caps’ negotiated back in 1997, are far from the last word in determining these funding levels for 2000. But they still constitute the most explicit statement available of the priorities of this chamber of the Republican Congress.

Science and technology account for one dollar in seven of the so-called discretionary government spending that springs from the 13 appropriations bills. When Newt Gingrich was Speaker of the House, he instructed the appropriations subcommittees that basic science in particular was to be protected, even when money was tight. With Gingrich gone, however, some of these subcommittees appear to see science as a soft touch for reductions in funding.

At the Department of Energy, although House appropriators have supported non-weapons physics programmes, the proposed Spallation Neutron Source would get only a quarter of the money needed to begin construction. Plans for a new scientific simulation initiative at the energy department civilian laboratories would be shelved. (Across the whole government, in fact, the House cuts would eliminate most of the $360 million information-technology research programme proposed in February by the Clinton administration).

Over at the commerce department, the House is seeking to eliminate the Advanced Technology Programme at the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST). Nor is there any money either for construction of a long-planned Advanced Measurement Laboratory at NIST.

The worst news for science, however, comes in the appropriations bill for Veterans' Affairs, Housing and Urban Development (VA/HUD), which, for complex historical reasons, includes funding for the National Science Foundation (NSF) and the space agency NASA. The NSF gets no increase at all from the VA/HUD bill passed by the appropriations committee (see Nature 400, 490; 1999). NASA is hit for $1 billion in this bill, with space science cut 8 per cent from last year and Earth science programmes 16 per cent. According to a survey carried out by The Chronicle of Higher Education, each of these bills has also been larded with an unprecedented number of district-specific, pork-barrel research projects aimed at securing the bill's passage in a chamber where the Republicans hold the narrowest of margins.

The research agency missing from this status report is, of course, the National Institutes of Health (NIH). That's because NIH is in the appropriations bill for labour, health and education, to be drawn up by a subcommittee chaired by John Porter (Republican, Illinois). Porter's bill has been held back until last, while its total allocation has been subjected to recurrent raids by the other 12 appropriations bills that went before it, and now stands 20 per cent short of what its programmes cost this year.

That leaves the Congress facing an almighty budget crunch when it returns in September. It can either repeal the budget caps explicitly, fiddle the figures to find Porter's shortfall or implement massive cuts on politically popular programmes. Some predict that the caps will be bypassed before the new fiscal year begins on 1 October, and surging tax revenues are duly redirected to finance everyone's favourite programmes. But such a benign outcome looks increasingly elusive. The caps are, after all, the Republican party's main political achievement after four-and-a-half years in control of the Congress. And the demands for extra money have become so overwhelming that they are, overall, insatiable.

With the support of Porter and others, biomedical research may well find itself among the lucky few programmes whose demands are met when the dust settles. Thanks largely to choices by House appropriators, other science programmes will be less fortunate. That doesn's point to the balanced science policy recommended last year in a report from Vernon Ehlers (Republican, Michigan), deputy chairman of the house science committee, to his colleagues, as best serving the interests of the United States. Republicans who wish to restore the balance could start by amending the VA/HUD bill when the full House considers it after the summer recess.