As president-elect Barack Obama's team designs an economic stimulus programme involving large expenditures, it may seem that other priorities, such as strongly increased federal investment in the sciences, must wait for better times. We believe, to the contrary, that the stimulus package provides a great opportunity to begin rebuilding US science, because increased science funding is an ideal stimulus: it creates good jobs across the economy; there is large pent-up need so that money can be spent immediately; and it represents an investment in the infrastructures of scientific research and higher education that are vital to the future.
Basic science research in the US is largely funded by grants to individual investigators or national laboratories from the National Institutes of Health, National Science Foundation, the Department of Energy and other agencies. Federal money that science agencies invest in research grants, scientific infrastructure or national laboratories can be spent immediately to support research programmes already approved, salaries for laboratory scientists, purchases of supplies and equipment (most from small US businesses) and institutional expenses of the colleges, universities and medical schools where researchers work.
Scientific funding creates good jobs. For example, Families USA has estimated that each $1bn of NIH research grant funding creates more than 15,000 jobs with an average wage of $52,000 a year and generates $2.21bn of new business activity, a much better “multiplier” than many proposed parts of the stimulus package.