• The National Science Foundation will lead an interagency nanotechnology initiative, which will double research spending in this growing field to $500 million. Another interagency initiative would boost spending on computing research from $1.7 billion to $2.3 billion. The administration says that both projects will support basic research, not technology development.

  • The nuclear weapons research programme gets a $300 million boost, taking its budget to $4.6 billion. But there is no extra money for completion of the troubled National Ignition Facility (NIF) at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California. Bill Richardson, the energy secretary, repeated that any extra funds for NIF must come from Livermore's budget. “The science is sound” at NIF, Richardson said, “but the management stinks”.

  • NASA's hapless Mars programme gets a much-needed boost: after scraping by on budgets of $200 million to $250 million for several years, the multi-mission Mars effort gets $327 million. Of that, $35 million will go for ‘micromissions’ and a Mars telecommunication network described by the agency as “a publicly accessible, live-video ‘gateway’ to Mars”.

  • The biggest space-science initiative will investigate the Sun and solar storms. NASA's ‘Living With a Star’ programme — a combination of new missions and enhancements to old ones — will cost $511 million over five years. Among the spacecraft to be launched are a Solar Dynamics Observatory, Solar Sentinels and a Geospace Dynamics Network. Most of the money will go to the Goddard Space Flight Center in Maryland.

  • The NIH will get $47 million to start building a neuroscience centre on its Bethesda, Maryland, campus (see Nature 403, 123; 2000). The project would require another $26 million in the 2002 budget to complete the first phase of a proposed $270 million scheme that would include renovations and additions to existing buildings.

  • The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention would receive a $202 million increase, including $70 million for the construction of three laboratories dedicated to research into agents that could be used in bioterrorism and lethal pathogens such as the Ebola virus and hantavirus