Oceanography | June 2017
FROM THE PRESIDENT
The White House budget proposal for
FY2018 (OMB, 2017) includes substan-
tial cuts to scientific research programs.
Whether Congress enacts those propos-
als remains to be seen, but even if cur-
rent funding levels remain intact, ocean
(and other) scientists already believe
that research funding is tight. Are those
perceptions about tight funding really
true, or are we are imagining a rosy past
that didn’t really exist? Let’s see what
the data say.
This column builds on earlier efforts
in the “Sea Change” report (NRC, 2015),
which considered US National Science
Foundation (NSF) Ocean Sciences Divi-
sion (OCE) funding between 2000 and
2014 (with projections from 2015 to
2020). I also examine a longer data set
starting in 19701. This column is lim-
ited to NSF, which deserves credit for
transparency, as all of their data are pub-
licly available. I hope to look at other
US agencies and foreign governments
in future columns.
My starting point was dollars spent on
basic research by NSF-OCE (blue sym-
bols in Figure 1a, historical solid, projec-
tions open). Until recently, the numbers
generally rise through time. To correct
for inflation, I calculated 2016- equivalent
dollars from the US Consumer Price
Index (red symbols in Figure 1a). Those
inflation-corrected numbers correspond
with our gut feeling that times are tight:
the purchasing power for ocean sciences
research peaked in 2003–2004, and with
a few bumps has been declining for the
past 12 years.
Without question, budgets are far
below what they could have been had
they tracked a fixed percentage of the
US Gross Domestic Product (GDP). In
Figure 1a, the dashed lines (blue is con-
stant dollars, red is inflation corrected)
model potential NSF-OCE funding as
Follow the Money
0.0026% of GDP (the empirical average
percentage between 1970 and 2016).
The maximum purchasing power for
NSF-OCE occurred in the early 1970s,
during the International Decade of
Ocean Exploration (IDOE). From that
anomalously high peak, NSF-OCE fund-
ing fell by the early 1980s to near the con-
stant fraction of GDP lines. I was a grad-
uate student then and recall hearing the
grumblings about tight budgets and pro-
posal rejections.
A few years later, optimists dreamed
that science research would share in a
“peace dividend” following the collapse
of the former Soviet Union in 1991 and
the end of the Cold War. Sadly, that wind-
fall never happened for NSF-OCE, but
funding generally tracked GDP growth
until the mid-1990s.
When control of Congress changed in
the mid-1990s, the so-called “Gingrich
Revolution” and the “Contract for
America” led to a new era of funding cuts.
Even as economic growth led to increased
federal revenue (https:// www.whitehouse.
gov/ omb/ budget/ Historicals), funding for
ocean science fell below the percentage
of GDP model, and in inflation- corrected
terms actually declined slightly. By 1999
this reduction of funding was seen as a
crisis. President Clinton’s chief of staff
John Podesta said the cuts to science
were “threatening the potential progress
of innovation in America” (http://www.
nature.com/nature/journal/v401/n6749/
full/401103a0.html).
Proposals to double the NSF bud-
get over a five-year period never for-
mally passed as legislation (https://
www.aip.org/fyi/ 2002/congress- passes-
bill- authorizing- doubling-nsf-budget).
Nevertheless, Congress found ways to
invest in science between 2000 and 2003,
FIGURE 1. (a) History of NSF Ocean Sciences Division funding in constant dollars (blue symbols)
and inflation corrected values (2016-equivalent dollars, red symbols), along with hypothetical bud-
gets as 0.0026% of US GDP (constant dollars, blue dashed line; 2016-equivalent dollars, red dashed
line). (b) As in panel (a) but for total NSF research funding in all fields (dashed lines are 0.040% of
US GDP). (c) NSF OCE funding (blue, left axis) and NSF Total funding (green, right axis) as a vary-
ing % of US GDP. (d) NSF OCE as a percent of total NSF research funding.
$0.0
$200.0
$400.0
$600.0
$0.0
$200.0
$400.0
$600.0
1970 1980 1990 2000 2010 2020
Constant Dollars (Millions)
Fiscal Year
$0
$2,000
$4,000
$6,000
$8,000
$10,000
$0
$2,000
$4,000
$6,000
$8,000
$10,000
1970 1980 1990 2000 2010 2020
Constant Dollars (Millions)
Fiscal Year
0.01%
0.02%
0.03%
0.04%
0.05%
0.001%
0.002%
0.003%
0.004%
0.005%
1970 1980 1990 2000 2010 2020
NSF Total as % of US GDP
NSF OCE as % of US GDP
Fiscal Year
4.0%
5.0%
6.0%
7.0%
8.0%
9.0%
10.0%
4.0%
5.0%
6.0%
7.0%
8.0%
9.0%
10.0%
1970 1980 1990 2000 2010 2020
NSF OCE as % of NSF Total
NSF OCE as % of NSF Total
Fiscal Year
NSF-OCE
NSF Total
% of GDP
% of NSF Total
Infation Adjusted 2016 Dollars
(Millions)
Infation Adjusted 2016 Dollars
(Millions)