How Biden and Harris could refocus the White House on science

In each of its annual budget requests, the Trump administration made deep funding cuts to federal research spending, in spite of Congress' consistent refusals. However, the administration's 2021 proposal actually sought to promote AI and quantum computing research. It asked for double funding to those departments in the National Science Foundation, the National Institutes of Health, the Department of Energy, Darpa, and the Joint AI Center to $2 billion annually. While decried as wholly inadequate to address the field's rate of technical advance, that funding bump would come at the expense of funding other basic sciences in those same agencies, as well as an overall reduction in research and development spending by 9 percent over 2020, to $142.2 billion. "I find it disappointing and concerning that funding for basic research is down," Martijn Rasser, a senior fellow at the Center for a New American Security, told Wired in 2020.