BERAC and the Budget

Here is a followup to yesterday's entry about BERAC.

 

The Office of Science had a budget of $4,903,710,000 in FY 2010.  The Presidential budget request ups the budget by 4.4% to just over $5.1 billion for FY 2011.  Although I haven't done all the math, the increase is a little slower than what is necessary to match the goals set out in the America COMPETES ACT (previously discussed in this post).  A vast majority of the people at the meeting were thrilled with the increase.  Especially in light of the budget freeze.

 

According to the Office of Science, this money supports:

 

• 27,000 Ph.D.s, graduate students, undergraduates, engineers and technicians
• 26,000 users of open-access facilities
• 300 leading academic institutions
• 17 DOE laboratories

 

That sounds like a pretty good bang for your buck.

 

The Biological and Environmental Research (BER) programs had a $604 million budget in 2010, and received a 3.8% increase to nearly $627 million in the FY '11 request.

 

This increase is due to a main Presidential priority - Global Climate Change.  The BER mission overlaps perfectly with Obama's focus on the issue.

 

According to BER, they provide the foundational science to:

 

• Support the development of biofuels as major, secure, and sustainable natural energy resources
• Understand the potential effects of greenhouse gas emissions on Earth's climate and biosphere and the implications of these emissions for our energy future
• Predict the fate and transport of contaminants in the subsurface environment at DOE sites
• Develop new tools to explore the interface of biological and physical sciences

 

In my next post, I hope to provide some cool examples from the meeting on how the mission statement is getting translated into research.

 

To be continued...