{"id":922,"date":"2006-12-13T11:11:08","date_gmt":"2006-12-13T11:11:08","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/scienceblogs.com\/principles\/2006\/12\/13\/the-budget-mess\/"},"modified":"2006-12-13T11:11:08","modified_gmt":"2006-12-13T11:11:08","slug":"the-budget-mess","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/2006\/12\/13\/the-budget-mess\/","title":{"rendered":"The Budget Mess"},"content":{"rendered":"

The Democrats have decided to punt on the budget<\/a>, which the outgoing Republican Congress left unfinished in a childish fit of pique. Instead of completing the usual budget process, the incoming Congress plans to pass a “continuing resolution,” to fund 2007 operations of Federal agencies at the same level as 2006.<\/p>\n

See, people, this is what happens when you put the grown-ups back in charge– the first thing they do is cancel Christmas.<\/p>\n

Inside Higher Ed<\/cite> gives a run-down of the implications for academia<\/a>, which I know is what you were all dying to hear about. The bottom line isn’t particularly good– a number of funding increases set for research agencies will be left out of the continuing resolution, which puts a bit of a squeeze on places like NIST and the DoE labs. A long-awaited increase in the Pell Grant program also looks like it’s not going to happen this year.<\/p>\n

The other high-profile development is the elimination of “earmarks” in the continuing resolution, which will knock out a billion dollars or so of funds that were targeted for specific programs at institutions in the districts of influential members of Congress. This potentially ends up being a wash, because the former earmark money could possibly be redirected to fund the normal operations of scientific agencies, which are a bit strapped for cash.<\/p>\n

Anyway, not much fun for my friends and colleagues in government labs. I was at NIST the last time they ran on continuing resolutions for a long time, and during the Great Government Shutdown of the Clinton years, and it pretty much sucked. On the bright side, though, this is most likely a temporary blip, as control of the legislature has returned to the hands of people who are comfortable with the Enlightenment.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The Democrats have decided to punt on the budget, which the outgoing Republican Congress left unfinished in a childish fit of pique. Instead of completing the usual budget process, the incoming Congress plans to pass a “continuing resolution,” to fund 2007 operations of Federal agencies at the same level as 2006. See, people, this is… Continue reading The Budget Mess<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"1","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[8,47,28],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-922","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-academia","category-economics","category-politics","entry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/922","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=922"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/922\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=922"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=922"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=922"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}