Donald Trump has sent Congress a $4.4 trillion budget proposal for the 2019 fiscal year, and it’s a mixed bag for technology. Despite adding $984 billion to the federal deficit next year, it would also introduce some serious cuts for scientific research.
What’s safe: The National Institutes of Health, the National Science Foundation, and the Department of Energy’s Office of Science all get funding continued at 2017 levels. The Food and Drug Administration gets a funding boost, as does NASA (for space exploration, at least).
The cuts: The DoE’s ARPA-E energy moonshot unit, five NASA Earth science missions, the International Space Station, and some research programs at the Environmental Protection Agency, National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, and Geological Survey are all for the chop. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention also faces cuts.
Now what? Congress gets the last word, and it may yet dismiss many of the cuts.
