Trump’s Science Budget
When it comes to funding for science, Clinton’s priorities look a lot like Obama’s. But Trump’s are very different. (SPOILER ALERT for those of you who didn’t see that coming.) In particular, there are a couple of big changes that a Trump presidency would likely bring to the federal science budget.
First is NASA. Trump digs space exploration, and while it would be inaccurate to say Obama has been anti-astronaut or something, he has definitely de-prioritized NASA’s space-travel mission in favor of its earth-science mission (i.e., studying climate change). Over the course of the Obama presidency, the budget for NASA earth science research increased by 70 percent. His disinterest in returning to the moon, in particular, has been critiqued on both sides of the aisle. If a President Trump wanted to build bipartisan scientific goodwill, a moon mission would be a good way to do it.
The second thing is the Department of Energy, where funding has been heavily weighted toward research on and support for renewables. For instance, the DOE’s budget for energy-efficiency and renewable-energy programs grew by 40 percent between Obama’s 2016 and proposed 2017 budget — while funding for fossil fuel programs (think R&D and clean coal tech) fell by 27 percent, and it was lower than the clean-energy budget to begin with. It’s likely that a Trump administration would reverse these trends.