Washington

Four-and-a-half months into the financial year, US research agencies finally know how much money they can spend this year.

The appropriations bill for 2003, which should have been agreed last October, was finally passed by both houses of Congress on 13 February. It provides large increases for the top two science agencies — the National Institutes of Health (NIH) and the National Science Foundation (NSF). But it has left some researchers worried that these agencies will see only slim increases in 2004.

Under the final 2003 budget, the NIH, which was set to complete a historic five-year doubling of its funding this year, will get $26.5 billion. This is just shy of the $27.3 billion that would have completed the doubling, and represents a 13% increase over the budget for 2002. The NSF gets $5.3 billion, an 11% increase over the 2002 budget.

The NSF increase was welcomed by some biomedical research organizations, which have recently been calling for Congress to treat the foundation as well as it traditionally treats the NIH. “For the biomedical sciences to flourish you need the contributions that the NSF makes,” says Steven Teitelbaum, president of the Federation of American Societies for Experimental Biology.

But the confirmation of the figures for 2003 has put the budget proposed by President George Bush for 2004 (see Nature 421, 565; 2003) under fresh scrutiny. As things now stand, the president is proposing a 2% increase for the NIH next year and 3.4% for the NSF — even though the president signed a bill last December that recommended doubling the latter's funding over five years. “The level of funding proposed in the 2004 budget is far from adequate,” says Congressman Roscoe Bartlett (Republican, Maryland), a member of the House Committee on Science.

There is little good news for physicists supported by the Department of Energy's Office of Science. The $3.3 billion budget is a meagre 2% increase over last year. “It's a lousy situation,” says April Burke of Washington lobbying firm Lewis-Burke Associates, but she remains hopeful that future budgets may be more generous.

The appropriations bill passed by the Congress also allowed NASA a $500 million increase over last year — including an additional $50 million for its investigation into the Columbia accident — bringing its total funding to $15.4 billion.

President Bush is expected to sign the 2003 budget into law, leaving Congress free to busy itself with his 2004 proposal.