What will the sequester do to science in the US?

[LongTomH]

Cross-post from GD:

The Wonkette blog has an occasional science post; last week's was titled: Hunky Dory Life On Mars: Your Weekly Sci-Blog. It starts with some interesting observations on the history of our human interest in the possibility of life on Mars. Buried down in the post, past the paragraphs on Cornell University's study of incompetent people (Surprise! They don't realize how incompetent they are!), and the opening of the Atacama Large Millimeter-Submillimeter Array in Chile is a brief discussion of what the sequester will do to science in the US:

The Republican party’s Grand Experiment with the Shock Doctrine* in America is proceeding just as planned. The gradual, fear driven disassembly of our painstakingly constructed civil society is bearing fruit, with inevitable budget cuts to federally subsidized scientific research and the prospect that cuts to research grants now will set back Medical Science for a generation.

What's happening is that agencies responsible for science funding are doing their best to preserve existing grants; but, funding for new grants is going under the budget axe. From the Nature article:

The cuts, which would save US$85 billion this year and reduce the federal deficit by $1.2 trillion over the next nine years, have already started to be felt among scientists, as agencies delayed making decisions in anticipation. But with the writing on the wall, science agencies began opening up this week about their plans for the cuts — and they include a greater degree of flexibility than typically advertised (see ‘Science agencies prepare for cuts’). Outgoing US National Science Foundation director Subra Suresh issued a statement on 27 February indicating that the agency expected to maintain funding for already-approved research grants while eliminating about 1,000 new grants.

This will have a chilling impact on young scientists just starting their careers. A prime example of this will be the expected impact on the National Institutes of Health:

Dylan Matthews: The NIH is facing an 8.2 percent across-the-board cut in future years (5.3 percent for 2013). What would that do to the institutes, were it to take effect?

Elias Zerhouni: I think the suddenness of it and the depth of it would be a disaster for research, which is not an activity that you can turn on and off from year to year. It’s an activity that takes time. The most impacted are the young, new investigator scientists, who are coming into science, and will now abandon the field of science. There will be a generational gap created.

An average grant is five years long, because science is like that. So think: That means that every one year, only 20 percent of the grants come to their end. So any one year, NIH only has 20 percent of its money available for new grants. At NIH, about half of the grants get terminated at five years, but the rest get to be continued, as you don’t want to throw away good research. So the half of it that’s left has to go to very promising areas of science, and you have 10 percent left.

If you take 8 percent of that 10 percent, it’s going to come from new science, new people, young investigators; we are going to maim our innovation capabilities if you do these abrupt deep cuts at NIH. It will impact science for generations to come.

The sequester cuts are likely to impact weather forecasting as well. Many of our existing weather satellites are nearing the end of their expected useful life. The Washington Post reports that the sequester could seriously delay replacement, leaving as much as a five and a half year gap in coverage.

But, what the hey! Military funding has been protected from the sequester budget axe, hasn't it?

[Newest Reality]

1. Austerity

comes to the US of A through a very neat backdoor of brilliant, conceptual manipulation!!!

Time to make your patriotic sacrifice for victory over ... ah ... us!

[Pterodactyl]

2. Actually, no, military funding is not protected.

[Orsino]

3. The same thing it does to everything else it touches. n/t