House science appropriations: so far so good

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Peter Harsha is reporting at the CRA’s Policy Blog that the first indications of whether the United States Congress will stick with its commitment to double the budgets of some key federal science agencies are good:

For FY 2008, the subcommittees that have jurisdiction over some of the science agencies we care about — NSF, NIST, DOE Sci, NIH, NASA, and DOD — have each gotten pretty reasonable-sized slices. The House Commerce, Science, Justice subcommittee, which determines funding for NSF, NIST, NASA and NOAA, received from the Congressional leadership a bump of $3 billion to their allocation compared with last year — $53.35 billion for FY 08 vs. $50.34 for FY 07 — a level $2.11 billion higher than the President requested for FY 08.

We already reported on the DOE’s progress so far, and the committee that funds NIH got a bump of over $5B. There is a long way to go before these ideas become law, and remember we didn’t even have a budget for most Federal agencies in FY2007.