Yesterday, just hours before the deadline to pass legislation that would avoid a government shutdown, Congress approved the $1.3 trillion Consolidated Appropriations Act of 2018, a bill that would fund nearly all government agencies through the remainder of this fiscal year, ending on September 30.
The spending bill passed 65-32 in the Senate and 256-167 in the House. Science ended up doing very well, and the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) did great. NASA was given funding in the amount of $20.7 billion, $1.6 billion more than the Trump budget request had originally proposed.
The NASA budget includes $6,221,500,000 for Science. Of particular interest is the added funding of $150,000,000 for WFIRST. WFIRST was planned as the next space observatory in line after the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST), which is scheduled to launch sometime in the first part of 2019.
In 2010, the U.S. National Research Council Decadal Survey placed a top priority on the development of WFIRST, which moved from design study to formal development just last year.
In the White House proposed 2018 fiscal year budget request, WFIRST would have been shut down in favor of an unnamed “smaller principal investigator-led, astrophysics missions,” according to White House officials.
Four of the five Earth science programs the administration wanted to cut — the Plankton, Aerosol, Cloud, and ocean Ecosystem (PACE) mission, the CLARREO Pathfinder and Orbiting Carbon Observatory 3 instruments, and the Earth observation instruments on the Deep Space Climate Observatory spacecraft – were specifically funded in the new budget.
The fifth Earth Science program, called the Radiation Budget Instrument, was canceled by NASA earlier this year because of technical and programmatic issues.
NASA’s education program also would have been trashed if the White House had gotten its way. Instead, with bipartisan support, NASA got $100 million. The Restore-L satellite servicing mission, which the administration sought to convert into a more general, and much smaller, technology development program, receives $130 million in the bill.
Science was not left out of new budget
When President Donald Trump was sworn into office last year, the science community braced for the worst. Trump had made his beliefs on science, including climate change, part of his campaign, and this left the scientific community to wonder which programs he would cut first.
And of course, fears were justified because in March this year, Trump’s budget proposal called for significant boosts in military and border-security spending and “historically large cuts” for science and health agencies, particularly the Environmental Protection Agency and the National Institutes of Health, and climate-research programs across the government, according to the Atlantic.
It is pretty clear who is holding the government’s purse strings, and it is not the president. Trump was pretty much left standing on the dance floor alone this time because Republican lawmakers, it appears, are willing to formally disregard the president’s desires when it comes to science funding.
But in all, this has turned out to be a great day, not just for NASA, but all of science in the United States.
