Washington

Faced with the terrorist attacks on New York and Washington, lawmakers have put aside disagreements over the dwindling budget surplus and agreed a bipartisan funding package that should increase spending on most science programmes.

The package would allow Congress to proceed with previously stalled funding bills for the 2002 fiscal year, starting on 1 October. If the deal is approved by the White House, it will provide, among other things, $2.8 billion in further spending for the National Institutes of Health (NIH), and a boost of as much as $400 million for the National Science Foundation.

The intensive effort to wrap up the bills next month is being assisted by a modest infusion of extra money. “The sense is that we have more money than we thought we would have just a few weeks ago,” says one congressional aide, “but perhaps not as much as some ultimately would have hoped for at the end of the process.”

Congress is already reviewing research and development programmes that could aid the US response to the terrorist attacks. It may choose to bolster them with a portion of the $40 billion in emergency spending approved by Congress last week to deal directly with the attacks — or from further supplementary spending. Some have stated privately that the total bill for America's response to the attacks could come to several hundred billion dollars over an unspecified period of time.

President George W. Bush's administration was well on its way to finalizing the 2003 budget — which Bush will present next February — at the time of the attacks, but this will now be subject to drastic revision.

High security: bioterrorism work at the Centers for Disease Control is set to gain impetus. Credit: SPL

A House of Representatives panel that handles budgets for the NIH and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) met just three days after the attacks to review spending on programmes related to bioterrorism. The chair of the panel, Ralph Regula (Republican, Ohio), says that he expects Bush to allocate some of the emergency money to the CDC's civilian anti-bioterrorism activities, which involve both research and public-health initiatives. Regula thinks the Bush administration's plan to spend $181 million on CDC measures to combat bioterrorism in 2002 may be inadequate.

It is unclear whether the NIH might obtain more funding for bioterrorism projects. The government was already set to increase its budget from $49 million to $93 million next year. The work, which includes sequencing the genomes of potential bioterror agents, is aimed largely at developing better vaccines and diagnostic tests.

According to government officials, other candidates for emergency funding include secret military and security-related research programmes ('black-box' programmes) at Department of Energy laboratories.

A congressional aide who works with science programmes notes that as Congress reviews research, there will be a strong temptation to portray programmes as being relevant to counter-terrorism. “Everyone will recast what they're doing so it looks indirectly or directly related to this,” he says.

Before the attack, Mitch Daniels, director of the White House Office of Management and Budget, had been asking agencies to cut their budgets by 5% in 2003. But he had indicated that the White House would consider boosting non-biomedical research funding.

That will now have to be weighed against the requirements of a global military campaign, rebuilding in New York and Washington, and coping with the growing demands for social spending and revenue losses related to the ensuing economic downturn.

“The outlook for 2003 spending has been completely scrambled,” said one of the congressional aides. “All bets are off.”