Today, the scientific enterprise in the US is strong, highly productive and significantly greater than it was eight years ago. Contrary to popular mythology, President Bush has devoted more attention to science and technology in his official actions than most of his predecessors. Strains and imbalances exist among the various research fields, but the Bush administration has initiated programmes to address many of these on a prioritized basis. However, despite the magnitude of competing national needs and fiscal constraints affecting all domestic federal programmes, science in the US has moved forward substantially during the Bush years.

About one-third of US research and development (R&D) funding comes from federal sources appropriated by Congress, with most of the rest coming from the private sector. The total spent on R&D — $368bn in 2007 — remains remarkably steady year on year as a fraction of Gross Domestic Product (GDP) at about 2.7%. This is the highest figure of any large economy except Japan, where the proportion is 3.4%, and South Korea, where it is 3.2%. China, in contrast, ploughs back just 1.4% of GDP into research.

The federal portion of R&D for 2008 is $144bn. This is 12.7% of the “discretionary budget” — the part that is subject to the annual budgeting process and that excludes “mandatory” expenditures for social security, medical insurance and interest on the national debt. This figure is now higher than at the start of the Bush administration in 2001, when it was 12.3%.

In his second term, President Bush has aimed to reduce the overall budget deficit and keep discretionary budget growth below inflation. Nevertheless, on average, R&D budgets during this period fared better than other domestic programmes and have kept ahead of inflation. Over both terms, overall federal R&D has grown 41% in inflation-adjusted dollars to $147bn, and non-defence research has grown by 31% to $61bn. The total inflation-adjusted expenditures in various science categories during the Bush years compared with the previous administration are shown in table 1.

Compared with other countries, these are huge numbers, and it is remarkable that they have held up under the budgetary pressures of the past decade. Surveys, such as the Science and Engineering Indicators carried out this year by the National Science Foundation (NSF), show that scientific research is viewed positively by the US public — a view that is also shared by the Bush administration and both houses of Congress.

Rising above the storm

Beneath this impressive “top line” for US science are issues of emphasis and priority. These issues have energized critics and advocates of every stripe in the politically intense era following the presidential election of 2000, in which all of the administration’s actions were scrutinized. Issues like embryonic stem-cell research and responses to climate change, among others, are contentious for many reasons, but most of these have little to do with science. They comprise a small fraction of the total US science activity, and they do not reflect the deepest or even the most serious challenges in the overall R&D enterprise such as funding imbalances, lagging interest in technical careers and the impact of increased homeland-security measures on the conduct of science.

During the election year of 2004 these topics ballooned into caricatures of the underlying reality. Since then, the public discourse in the US has evolved to reflect a more balanced spectrum of opinion on these issues, especially about climate change. But myths remain about the administration’s attitudes.

It has fallen to the Bush administration to begin a major reorientation of federal science policy in the post Cold War era. Agencies within the Department of Defense (DOD) and the Department of Energy (DOE), the large basic-research programmes of which were generously supported by Congress during the Cold War, came under immediate scrutiny as the former Soviet Union disintegrated.

By the end of the 1990s, the US had withdrawn from the international fusion project ITER, cancelled the Superconducting Super Collider and sustained NASA’s International Space Station by the narrowest of margins in Congress. The DOD began closing research centres, while funding for the DOE’s highly productive physical-science laboratories flattened as Congress demanded a new rationale for their very existence.

Funding for the NSF failed to grow significantly with the booming economy of the 1990s, and the total R&D budget was essentially flat in “constant dollars” during the entire decade. Meanwhile, opportunities in biomedicine were outstripping the resources available at the National Institutes of Health (NIH), the primary sponsor for this field, and a broad consensus formed to double NIH budgets in five years, beginning in 1998.

During the first three years of the Bush administration, budgets for the NIH grew rapidly to half the total of all federal non-defence research. Meanwhile, the relative stagnation of basic research in the physical sciences was causing alarm in those industrial sectors that depend on it for innovation, especially in electronics and IT.

These fields were featured in a series of reports beginning in 2002 and culminating in the highly publicized 2005 report by the National Academies of Science entitled “Rising above the gathering storm”. The report made a dramatic case for economic competitiveness, not national security, as the new rationale for physical-sciences funding. It was also clear that any significant response to climate change and growing demands for energy independence would require major new investments in energy-related R&D.

The administration quickly reorganized and focused programmes in climate science and technology, rejoined the ITER project and launched substantial new energy-research programmes in the DOE. Following the completion of the NIH budget doubling, and while the aforementioned advisory reports were being written and released, the administration developed the American Competitiveness Initiative. This, among other important objectives, doubles the budgets of the NSF, the DOE science office and the National Institute for Standards and Technology, and reorients DOD research. Congress supported this initiative in its America COMPETES Act in 2006, and has maintained funding for the key agencies, but it has yet to follow through on its commitment of increased funding.

This story of budgets and balances is only one aspect of the vast US science enterprise, but no other has comparable strategic importance. I expect future administrations will sustain the bipartisan momentum that has been achieved in the Bush administration to build basic research in areas vital to the nation’s long-term interests.