Competitive stumbling

摘要

Promised investment in the physical sciences is held up in a US budget jam. In his State of the Union Address last January, President George W. Bush announced an American Competitiveness Initiative, which included substantial increases in funding for the physical sciences as a means of securing US industrial competitiveness in the long term. This laudable initiative set out to increase expenditure on research in physics, engineering and other disciplines at the National Science Foundation, the Department of Energy and the National Institute of Standards and Technology.