NIH, FDA, and all other federal agencies were forced to cut spending across the board—by about 5% for nondefense agencies—in March to comply with the “sequestration” agreed to by both houses of Congress and President Obama in their Budget Control Act of 2011. The agencies fared worse in October, when the absence of a budget forced the federal government into a partial shutdown that lasted more than two weeks and made Congress the butt of jokes nationwide, from late-night TV comics to researchers and professional groups frustrated by their inability to get grants.
“As America keeps hitting the brakes on scientific research, we are, in effect, accelerating the damage done to our continued leadership in global bioscience, in health outcomes, and in the economic power that we have always derived from basic research,” Stefano Bertuzzi, Ph.D., executive director of the American Society for Cell Biology (ASCB), said during the partial shutdown.
Washington got back to work October 17, following a deal in which Obama joined the Republican-led House of Representatives and Democratic-led Senate in funding the federal government through January 15 and raising the nation’s borrowing limit or “debt ceiling” through February 7. The relative calm between the parties stretched into December with a bipartisan budget agreement for FY 2014 that will likely reverse much of the sequestration cut, though detailed agency budgets had yet to be decided at deadline. Also anybody’s guess is how long the era of good feeling will last into 2014, since a re-election year for the entire House and one-third of the Senate can be expected to re-ignite the partisan squabbling seen through so much of 2013.