washington

Science lobbyists in the United States face a tough battle this summer to restore research funding at the space agency NASA and at the National Science Foundation (NSF). The House of Representatives' Appropriations Committee has proposed a bill that would slash NASA's budget by almost $1 billion and freeze spending at the NSF.

Efforts will be made to restore some of the NASA spending this week, when the Republican-controlled House tries to pass the broad budget bill that covers Veterans' Affairs and Housing and Urban Development (VA-HUD) and independent agencies, which includes funding for the NSF and NASA.

A spokesman for Jim Sensenbrenner (Republican, Wisconsin), chairman of the House Science Committee, said he was “trying to ensure that some of the funds were restored” before the House votes on the bill.

The version of the bill passed by the Appropriations Committee last week proposed huge cuts in research at NASA. The bill would reduce the space agency's total budget from $13.7 billion to $12.7 billion, and cut space science by $240 million and Earth science by $285 million.

The committee voted to restore $400 million worth of cuts — including the cancellation of the Space Infrared Telescope Facility project — which had earlier been endorsed by its VA-HUD subcommittee.

The bill would also hold the NSF's budget at its 1999 level of $3.65 billion, denying a request from the Clinton administration for a 6 per cent increase. The version would grant only $35 million of the $146 million that the administration requested for a new information technology research initiative.

Agency heads moved quickly to attack the proposals. “Not only is this cut devastating to NASA's programmes, it is a knife in the heart of employee morale,” said NASA administrator Dan Goldin. NSF director Rita Colwell said in a statement: “We're ready to do twenty-first century science and engineering, but we can't do it on a twentieth-century budget.”

But the cuts proposed in the House VA-HUD bill are a long way from being implemented. They reflect the low budget allocation granted to the bill to keep spending under the tight budget caps agreed by the Congress and the administration in 1997.

The cuts proposed for NASA's Earth sciences programme will be bitterly opposed by influential senators such as Barbara Mikulski (Democrat, Maryland), whose state is home to the Goddard Space Center. The White House also said it would veto the bill on various grounds, including its funding levels for NASA and the NSF.