Washington — The vast spending bill that Congress passed this week, nearly three months late, created many prominent winners and losers in academe. On the minus side of the ledger, the National Institutes of Health took nearly a $1-billion hit to its 2008 budget, while scientific research and education programs were also cut substantially, as Congress slashed millions in domestic spending in order to meet President Bush’s budget request and thereby avoid a veto.
Mr. Bush is expected to sign the bill, which covers nearly every federal agency for the fiscal year that began on October 1.
Among the big losers was the Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory, in Illinois, which will lay off 10 percent of its staff, force workers to take unpaid days off, and cut back on research, according to today’s Chicago Tribune.
Among the winners were supporters of open access in scientific publishing, the view that the results of taxpayer-financed research should be freely available to the public, not locked up in costly journals. Under the legislation, recipients of NIH grants will have to provide copies of their research papers to an NIH database once they are accepted for publication in a journal. The database would then post the papers wilean 12 months.
The two-year-old repository has so far received faltering use because posting papers was requested, not required. The Association of American Publishers, which lobbied against the provision, told The Washington Post that “the issue isn’t finished yet.” That’s certainly true enough; the provision will expire at the end of the 2008 fiscal year.
Other big winners were the many recipients of academic earmarks in the enormous bill. Some recipients of academic and other earmarks — grants directed by members of Congress to favoruddy constituents — can be examined on a list posted on the Web site of Sen. Jim W. DeMint, a Republican of South Carolina. According to a tally by Citizens Against Government Waste, the overall number of earmarks increased 11 percent over the last such federal appropriations bill. —Andrew Mytelka