724 14 FEBRUARY 2020 • VOL 367 ISSUE 6479 sciencemag.org SCIENCEPHOTO: CAROLINE BREHMAN/CQ-ROLL CALL INC./GETTY IMAGESquest. It proposes an $839 million cut in
NASA’s $7.1 billion science directorate by
killing the agency’s education programs,
the Stratospheric Observatory for Infrared
Astronomy, the Wide Field Infrared Survey
Telescope, and two earth science missions
aimed at collecting ocean and climate data.
Congress has previously rejected those cuts.
Within the proposed 17% cut in DOE’s
$7 billion Office of Science, fusion, high-
energy physics, and biological and envi-
ronmental research are hit especially hard,
although no details were available at press
time. And Trump has once again proposed
eliminating the Advanced Research Proj-
ects Agency-Energy, which this year re-
ceived $425 million.
At NSF, polar research and the biology
and geosciences directorates would be cut
by double digits from 2019, and its flag-
ship graduate research fellowship program
would shrink by 20%, to 1600 annual slots.
The budget would drop the U.S. Geological
Survey’s (USGS’s) primary cooperative re-
search program with universities. That ac-
tivity, which helps fund graduate students,
is seen as “outside the core USGS mission.”
Droegemeier took the reins of the White
House Office of Science and Technology
Policy in January 2019, and this is the first
budget proposal he helped craft and had to
defend. But little appears to have changed.
In previous years, Trump had sought cuts
of 13%, 21%, and 10% in federal spending
on basic research, the subset of overall re-
search that supports most academic scien-
tists. And science lobbyists did not see this
year’s 6% cut as much of an improvement.
“[It] falls far short of the investment
needed to secure the United States’s posi-
tion as the world’s preeminent economic
power,” says Peter McPherson, president of
the Association of Public and Land-grant
Universities. “At a time when our global
competitors are doubling down on invest-
ments in education and research, we can’t
afford to fall behind.”
Advocates for biomedical research ap-
plauded stable funding in a few areas,
notably research on pediatric cancer and
pain, but disputed Trump’s assertion that
his budget would improve the health of all
Americans. “Overall, [his] budget would
deal a devastating blow to patients and
their families,” Mary Woolley, who leads
Research!America, wrote in a statement. At
NIH, the number of new and competing re-
search grants would drop by 1874 from this
year’s estimated 11,379.
Supporters of agricultural research were
heartened by a boost of $175 million, to
$600 million, for the Agriculture and Food
Research Initiative, the U.S. Department
of Agriculture’s (USDA’s) primary competi-tive grants program for universities. Most
of the new money would go to AI-related
research. Overall, R&D at USDA would be
trimmed by $172 million, to $2.8 billion.
Congress will have the final say on spend-
ing for the 2021 fiscal year, which begins
on 1 October. But lawmakers will have less
flexibility to boost science spending than in
the recent past. A budget deal struck in July
2019 imposed tight caps on both civilian
and defense spending. In particular, it al-
lows only a $2.5 billion increase in domestic
discretionary spending, or only 0.4% more
than the $632 billion for this year. However,
Trump’s new budget flouts that agreement
by seeking to cut domestic spending by 7%,
or some $45 billion. jWith reporting by Adrian Cho, Jocelyn Kaiser,
and David Malakof.ASTRONOMYBig telescopes
join the hunt
for flashes in
the sky
L
ast month, gravitational wave detec-
tors picked up ripples in spacetime
from a cosmic cataclysm: the pos-
sible merger of a black hole with
a neutron star, an event never seen
before. Responding to an alert, tele-
scopes around the world swiveled toward
the apparent source to watch for the col-
lision’s afterglow and confirm that it was
a first. The array of telescopes joining the
hunt was unprecedented, too: It included
the 8.1-meter Gemini North telescope on
Hawaii’s Mauna Kea, one of the biggest in
the world.
On this occasion, Gemini and the other
telescopes saw nothing unexpected. Yet it
was an important test of a new telescope
network and software developed to auto-
mate observations of fast-moving events.
Rejigging Gemini’s nightly schedule nor-
mally takes hours, but this time it was ac-
complished in minutes with a few clicks
of a mouse. “We’re on the verge of a new
era,” says Andy Howell of Las Cumbres
Observatory (LCO), an existing rapid re-
sponse network, who helped develop the
software. “It’s a whole new way to observe
the universe.”
Telescopes and other detectors that scan
the sky for events that change daily, hourly,
or even by the minute are creating a need
for fast follow-up observations. Setting the
pace now is the Zwicky Transient Facility,
a 1.2-meter survey telescope in California
that produces up to 1 million transient
alerts per night, flagging objects that in-
clude supernovae, flaring galactic nuclei,
and passing asteroids. The telescope has
even alerted astronomers to black holes
in the act of swallowing stars (Science,
31 January, p. 495). But in 3 years’ time,By Daniel CleryAutomated networks aim
to catch “transients” such
as comets, supernovae,
and colliding neutron stars
Research advocates decry a fourth straight year of proposed spending cuts by President Donald Trump.
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Published by AAAS