Sequestration Ushers In A Dark Age For Science In America
Unbelievably good and true article from the HuffingtonPost. First, some excerpts:
In 2013 alone, NIH, the primary federal spigot for projects impacting human health, will be forced to cut $1.7 billion from its budget. Government agencies across the board are making similar reductions in their research budgets as well. The length of some grants have been shortened, while others have decreased in size and still others have been eliminated altogether. Though they aren't supposed to do so, university officials have begun siphoning money from funded projects to those feeling the pinch, in hopes that if they hang on long enough, help will eventually come....
At the University of Virginia, hopes are wearing thin. After our first phone interview in July, Dutta ended the conversation with thanks. "I appreciate you doing this story because we need your help, buddy," he said. "We are in deep shit."
It's not just projects receiving NIH grants that have been set back by sequestration. Various other government agencies have seen their research budgets slashed as well. Early estimates from the American Association for the Advancement of Science projected that $9.3 billion would be cut from research and development projects in 2013 alone, including $6.4 billion from the Department of Defense....
Tom Antonsen and Phil Sprangle, two professors at the University of Maryland, said they've experienced funding shortages from the Defense Department that could hamper their work.
The non-technical term for this is "brain drain." It had been happening for years prior to sequestration, though the recent cuts have accelerated it. Antonsen, a plasma physicist who studies the production and interaction of electromagnetic fields with matter, said he has lost two staffers so far: one has left the country and another accepted a job at a Wall Street bank. A third is currently looking for work outside the field.----------
Boston University's Gursky said that her program in Physiology and Biophysics had had no incoming graduate students during the last two academic years, while the overall number of matriculating PhD students at other programs had "dropped sharply." Dutta said a prospective hire in India had recently turned down a job offer in favor of going to Germany.
So here's the deal. Republicans claim to be a) concerned about education, b) concerned about defense, and c) concerned about the economic future of this great nation. The hits that sequestration is landing on our higher education system attack all three - and they don't seem to care. Oh, they talk a good game about worrying about our budget deficit -- nevermind that the economy depends on new business, new sectors, new products, and innovation (that's what made America great). Undercutting our innovation engine - forcing brilliant innovators into economic analysis for Wall Street firms - hurts us in the long-term. Taking away the incentives required for brilliant innovators to invest their time in higher education hurts us in the long-term. Places like NASA and NOAA and NIST actual inspire kids to take up science rather than accounting in high school and college. And the Republicans are undercutting them too. And finally, their sequestration cuts are hitting defense directly, in terms of our readiness and our troop strength, and they are hitting our defense directly, in taking away the innovation that allows us to use drones to kill terrorists, fight cyberwars with incredibly destructive viruses like Stuxnet, fly things like stealth helicopters and fire things like cruise missiles. And that doesn't even talk about the classified research we won't know about for decades (if ever), but still which keep us safer.
So, they can tout their ideological conservative purity, but they are hypocrites. Sad and dangerous hypocrites. I could call them a lot of other names, but it is their hypocrisy that hurts us the most.
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