The US Senate continues to work on the appropriation bills to set funding levels for next years US fiscal year that starts October 1. The CRA has a summary of the various bills affecting research funding in computer science (see also this note from AIP). Most worrisome (as I've mentioned before) is the funding for the VA-HUD bill that covers the NSF. The House committee would cut the budget by 2%. The CRA has an Advocacy Alert, still time to contact your senators.
Why on earth is NSF funding lumped into th VA-HUD bill? The Veteran's Administration and the department of Housing and Urban development are enormous social welfare programs that have little to do with the NSF. Shouldn't the NSF be included with some kind of education or commerce group?
ReplyDeleteI don't know much about the guts of the federal bureaucracy, but it seems that lumping the NSF in with the VA and HUD only harms the NSF because it is competing with well connected and politically popular constituencies.