AAS Public Policy Blog

Indications are that the Senate will end debate on the Omnibus appropriations bill left over from FY 2009 and pass the bill today, unaltered from the House version that passed last month.

The omnibus bill, a collection of several leftover appropriations bills from last year, contains considerable increases to science, compared to the funding levels of the continuing resolution.

The summary for the recently released Commerce, Justice, Science appropriation bill is available along with more detailed documents and bill text for all the the remaining appropriation bills from 2009.

NASA and NSF both received modest increases, though remember the stimulus bill (PDF link to bill text) is effectively a FY 2009 supplemental, so to fully appreciate the agency’s budgets one needs to add in the stimulus money to these numbers. Never-the-less, for NASA and NSF:

• National Aeronautics and Space Administration: $17.8 billion, $385 million above 2008, for scientific discovery, national security, and space exploration.

*National Science Foundation: $6.5 billion, $363 million above 2008, for the most promising scientific research at America’s colleges and universities, and supporting scientists with cutting edge labs and equipment.

The NASA breakdown is $4.5 Billion for the Science Mission Directorate, $500 million for Aeronautics, $3.5 for exploration, $5.76 billion for Space Operations, $3.3 billion for cross-agency support, $169 million for education.

Update More details are found in the explanatory supplements linked above; for the NSF for example the bill includes:

National Radio Astronomy Observatory: The bill includes $49,790,000 for the National Radio Astronomy Observatory.

Astronomical sciences: Within the funds provided, $2,500,000 has been provided above the request to fund the design work of the advanced technology solar telescope. In addition, a total of $2,500,000 from astronomical sciences is included for the maintenance and operations costs associated with IceCube.

MAJOR RESEARCH EQUIPMENT AND FACILITIES CONSTRUCTION

The bill includes $152,010,000 for major research equipment and facilities construction for fiscal year 2009. The bill provides for the following allocation of funds:

• AdvLigo $51,430,000
• Atacama Large Millimeter Array (ALMA) 82,250,000
• IceCube Neutrino Observatory 11,330,000
• Advanced Technology Solar Telescope (ATST) 7,000,000

AIP’s latest FYI covers the 2009 appropriations. Incidentally, it looks like they offer an RSS feed, but it only contains the most recent issue, not any back issues. Otherwise, I’d include the feed on the sidebar.