This month's US Senate budget resolution is the best pointer yet to what next year's science budget will contain, and the signals it sends are mixed. On the one hand, the resolution specifies a generous increase for research at the National Institutes of Health. On the other hand, it does not do much for research at other agencies.

The budget resolution groups together the National Aeronautics and Space Administration, the National Science Foundation and the civilian research activities of the Department of Energy in a category called ‘general science, space and technology’. The Senate resolution offers a small increase to this element of the budget next year, followed by steady decline for the following four years. But it includes an amendment stating that it is ‘the sense of the Senate’ that spending on scientific research should double over the next ten years. The science community can thank Representative George Brown (Democrat, California) for pointing out this incongruity (see page 637).

To be fair, President Bill Clinton did no better in his February budget, which boosted science and other favoured programmes with money which he did not save elsewhere. The Senate has now entered into the same spirit, unanimously passing a non-binding motion to double spending on scientific research in a budget resolution that will, in fact, leave appropriators hard pushed to come up with any increases at all for key science agencies.

The best hope for bridging the gap between rhetoric and budget lines is still the so-called ‘tobacco settlement’, which each day looks less like a public health measure and more like a tool to satisfy Washington's spending addiction by means of new and regressive taxation. It is regrettable that neither the administration nor the Senate has had the courage to meet their stated spending priorities from within the limits to which they themselves agreed under last year's balanced budget agreement.