Trump science budget sows confusion

US president makes last-minute decision to abandon proposal for major cuts to National Institutes of Health, National Science Foundation and Department of Energy’s science office.

Confusion reigned on 12 February, as US President Donald Trump released his budget request for the 2019 fiscal year.

Just four days earlier, the Congress had lifted mandatory caps on government spending, sending the Trump administration scrambling at the last minute to revise its budget proposal. The White House abandoned its original plan to seek a 27% funding cut for the National Institutes of Health (NIH), a 29% decrease for the National Science Foundation (NSF) and a 22% reduction for the Department of Energy (DOE) Office of Science, holding their funding steady. But the details of Trump’s vision for many agencies remain fuzzy, frustrating science advocates.

“The big headline is that at the eleventh hour, [the White House] backed away from their intention of dramatically scaling back on basic research,” says Matt Hourihan, director of the research and development budget and policy programme at the American Association for the Advancement of Science in Washington DC. But science agencies aren’t out of the woods yet, he warns. Even in a budget that seems to support basic science, “they’re still going after programmes, like environmental programmes, that they believe fall outside the purview of government”, Hourihan says.