GREENING up science AKA.....
“Stimulating science
Within a week of the election in November 2008, and with the economy in free fall, Obama’s advisers started working with the scientific community to survey ‘shovel-ready’ projects for potential inclusion in a stimulus package intended to boost construction and get people back to work. They initially aimed for US$5 billion in initiatives, but House Democrats doubled that in a draft of the stimulus bill released on 15 January 2009, five days before Obama’s inauguration. And the role of science and innovation continued to grow.
On 17 February, exactly 4 weeks into office, Obama signed a $787-billion stimulus bill that contained at least $53 billion for science. The bill made good on Obama’s promises to advance basic and applied research and development aimed at the major problems of the day, including clean energy and global warming. It boosted research funding by $2 billion at the National Science Foundation in Arlington, Virginia, and by $8.2 billion at the NIH. As he signed the bill at the Denver Museum of Nature & Science in Colorado, Obama called it the biggest increase in the history of basic-research funding......
.......If the health-care bill demonstrated the administration’s skills with Congress, then the way it handled NASA in early 2010 revealed how easily relations could sour. When the president rolled out his budget request in February, it held a bitter surprise for congressional supporters of the space agency. On the list of projects to be eliminated was Constellation, a programme to develop massive rockets to return humans to the Moon.
“This was a major policy pronouncement but it was revealed in a budget release,” says Scott Pace, director of the Space Policy Institute at George Washington University in Washington DC.Normally, an administration prepares Congress for such a change — but Obama’s sudden move led to what Pace calls a “bruising, year-long fight” with lawmakers in both parties. Eventually, several parts of the Constellation programme were reinstated. But by then, NASA had become an agency adrift, left to the mercy of parochial interests in Congress.
Human space flight and many other elements of NASA’s mission were never priorities of the Obama administration. In the 2013 budget request, the agency’s astrophysics and planetary-science programmes lost 8% of their funding compared with 2008. Obama was more interested in fixing problems with his home planet, and boosted funding for NASA’s Earth-sciences programmes by 44% over the same period......”
http://www.nature.com/news/us-science-the-obama-experiment-1.11481
Thanks forr all that detail!