Bloated Budgets of Federal Agencies

In the April 18 issue of C&E News, Susan Morrissey has an article involving the federal budgets of several science agencies. She discusses budget cuts in dollar terms rather than percentages. When the dollar reductions for the 2011 budget are compared with the expenditures in 2010, the percentage reductions are respectively for the NHS, NIST, and DOE, 0.7%, 12%, and 0.7%

The basic fault of the article is that it implies that there have been significant cuts in the new budgets for the three agencies, when the actual percentages show the reverse. Only the NIST has had a significant budget cut of 12%. The other two budget cuts are miniscule. This is unacceptable in these times of high budget deficits. All three of these agencies should have had their budgets cut by at least 30 to 40%.

I understand that we would not like to reduce the budgets too rapidly, since it would cut many federal emp-loyees from the payroll and exacerbate the unemployment problem. However, it still behooves us to keep in mind that the slight reductions of the two agencies mentioned above is not significant in terms of year to year change and also considering that the previous year budgets were likely considerably bloated.