“I don’t want to throw darts or rocks at anybody,” said Gov. Neil Abercrombie, Democrat of Hawaii, at the National Governors Association convention last month in Milwaukee, venting his frustration over the budget uncertainty. “I just want to know what the hell the numbers are.”
The budget woes are afflicting, among others, state governments, American Indian tribes, military contractors and cancer research laboratories. Budget experts said that the short-term concerns over next year’s dollar figures were already hampering long-term planning and making government officials hesitant to commit to big projects or to hire needed employees.
“You’re eating away little by little at the infrastructure and effectiveness of government,” said Philip Joyce, a professor at the University of Maryland.
In an interview, Dr. Francis Collins, the director of the National Institutes of Health, called 2013 the “darkest ever” year for the agency, whose budget is at its lowest inflation-adjusted appropriations level in more than a decade. The agency has been awarding grants to an increasingly smaller sliver of applicants as well.
The stopgap measures that have kept the government running have further hobbled the agency, he added. “Continuing resolutions discourage you from trying something new and bold,” he said. “You’re supposed to tread water. And science is very badly served by that tread-water message.”
One researcher who said he had felt the impact of the budget wars is Steven Salzberg, the director of the Center for Computational Biology at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore and a lauded biomedical researcher. Mr. Salzberg said that he had received about 20 percent less in federal funding than his peers had recommended for his work on the biological underpinnings of cancer and other diseases.
“Less science is getting done,” he said. “That means cures won’t emerge. Five years from now, when your aunt gets cancer and you can’t do anything for her, people won’t stop and think, ‘Jesus, if we only hadn’t had the sequester!’ ”
Shorter grant cycles have forced scientists to rush to get results, he said. Increasing competition for funding has left him and his peers spending more and more time on paperwork, and less and less time on laboratory work. Worst of all, he said, promising young scientists are becoming discouraged and leaving the field.
“The current budget wars are a more extreme or egregious version of what has been going on for a number of years,” Mr. Salzberg said. “They’re wreaking havoc on people’s research plans.”
A broad range of budget officials described similar headaches emanating from Washington. Sequestration has forced programs that normally expect flat or increasing financing to make sudden cuts. Many programs delayed those cuts, and are scrambling to make them now — in some cases with reduced staffs because of furloughs or hiring freezes.
A number of budget issues lingered unresolved during Congress’s long summer recess. Earlier this year, the House and the Senate passed spending bills for the 2014 fiscal year, which begins on Oct. 1, that were about $90 billion apart, but never settled on a final figure.
With lawmakers returning to Washington next week, Congress is expected to pass another stopgap bill, known as a continuing resolution, financing the government for a few more months, but it is unclear whether such funding will stay at current levels or shrink. And if the Republicans who control the House and the Democrats who hold sway in the Senate fail to come to a deal before October, many parts of the federal government could shut down.
The breakdown of the Congressional budgeting process this summer has compounded the problems. Officials said that they had received no word about budget figures from Congressional appropriators — because such numbers do not yet exist.
Article source: http://www.nytimes.com/2013/09/04/business/budget-breakdown-keeps-federal-agencies-guessing.html?partner=rss&emc=rss