The Great HOWEVER...

[acroyear]

Pure Pedantry : Scientists Should Be Skeptical of Funding Through the Stimulus Package:

David Goldston, writing in Nature, echoes a point I have been trying to make about the science provisions of the economic stimulus package. He lists some reasons why scientists should be wary of getting our funding this way:

A couple of big items to ponder:

[Goldstein:] inclusion in the stimulus bill means the science money must be awarded with unusual, perhaps even reckless, speed. With the exception of the NIH, research agencies under the House bill will have to spend the funds within 120 days. That means that the National Science Foundation (NSF), for example, would have to allocate $3 billion -- a 50% increase in its budget -- in four months. As of last week, the NSF was still figuring out how it could do that -- whether to make more awards in whatever grant competitions it happens to have ongoing when a bill is signed, whether to revive worthy proposals from past competitions that were rejected because of lack of funds or whether to try some other strategy.

[...]

For starters, we are risking creating a market bubble in young researchers much like what happened in the Clinton and early Bush administration. Having graduate programs increase their size just to shrink again doesn't benefit anyone -- not young researchers, not programs, and not the public. Funding stability should be just as much a priority as funding size.

[...]

Third, we can't spend that much money both quickly and efficiently. Even after we get through the backlog of unfunded grants, there is going to be a lot of waste. As Goldston points out, all of that waste is going to be publicized eventually. If we end up funding even a little pseudoscience with this gush of money, we are going to pay for it in credibility. People will focus on the the minority of wasteful or misguided projects rather than the mostly good science.

What I want -- what I think we should all ask for -- is a decade-long commitment to scientific funding from Congress. While I understand scientists' glee at finally getting out of the sparer years of the Bush administration, the stimulus package is not a good way to fund science and may end up doing more harm than good.

This is not to say that the cuts were proposed because "wiser heads prevailed" and considered these points (likely not a single one came to mind to any Senator). The cuts are still the result of pig-ignorance, putting budgets (and anti-science politics) ahead of science, reason, and our future.