Friday, 19 April 1991 Washington, DC
1. DON LANGENBERG ELECTED APS VICE PRESIDENT IN SPECIAL
ELECTION.
The election was necessitated by Walter Massey's
resignation when he was picked to be Director of the National
Science Foundation. Langenberg, a condensed matter physicist, is
currently Chancellor of the University of Maryland system. A
Berkeley PhD, he has previously served as Chancellor of the
University of Illinois at Chicago and as Deputy Director of the
NSF. He is not new to the president business; last year he was
AAAS President. In his Candidate's Statement for the APS
election, he called on physi-cists to "step up to the difficult
issue of priority setting."
2. PRIORITY SETTING WAS THE THEME OF A SENATE HEARING ON THE
SSC.
Senator Wendell Ford (D-KY) mercilessly browbeat Allan Bromley,
the White House Science Advisor, in an attempt to elicit relative
priorities among science initiatives. Bromley never flinched; he
insisted that all Administration programs should be fully funded.
Nico Bloembergen was under no such restraint. Testifying for the
APS, he reaffirmed the APS position that SSC funding should not
come at the expense of individual investigator support--but then
he went on to propose how both could be funded: take it from the
manned space station. That, he said, would not be a setback for
science. The award for most ill-advised testimony went to Deputy
Secretary of Energy Henson Moore, who included magnetic resonance
imaging in his latest list of spin-offs from high-energy physics;
Bloembergen, one of the pioneers of NMR, was waiting to testify.
3. SPACE STATION FREEDOM WAS DESCRIBED AS "A GIANT STEP
NOWHERE,"
by Bruce Murray of the Planetary Society, which
supports manned space exploration. In a Senate hearing, he said
Freedom puts humans at risk for mundane purposes, fails to meet
user goals and portends financial disaster for the US civil space
program.
4. HOUSE BOMBS BUSH BUDGET, BUT NSF EMERGES WITHOUT A
SCRATCH.
The House overwhelmingly rejected the Bush spending plan for FY
92 in a largely party-line vote, but then proceeded to substitute
a budget plan of its own that moved a mere $13B out of the total
$1,459B set by last year's budget summit. The whole maneuver was
aimed at forcing Republicans to vote on the President's proposal
to cut medicare benefits. The budget plan provides only general
spending guidelines, but it is an important first step in the
appropriations process. Scientists worried that redistribution
of funds to social programs that were slighted in the Bush budget
might come at the expense of science, but the plan recommends the
full 17% increase for NSF requested by the President. However,
it cuts $80M from DOE's General Science Programs and specifies
that reductions should be avoided in projects such as CEBAF that
are near completion. The Bush request would take $20M from CEBAF,
stretching it by one year. The biggest cut is $1.2B from NASA,
with the Moon/Mars mission singled out to take much of the hit.
The Senate Budget Committee is contemplating more drastic cuts.
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