Forget the cherry blossoms and the monuments. Today the most remarkable sight in Washington DC is simply that of a government operating normally.
With barely an hour to go before a crucial budget deadline expired last night, congressional leaders arrived at a deal to fund the US government until October 1, 2011, the end of the current fiscal year.
“We’ve agreed to a historic level of cuts,” Senate Democratic majority leader Harry Reid announced on the Senate floor after news broke that he and the Republican House speaker, John Boehner, had settled on a 2011 budget that slashes approximately $38.5 billion from 2010 spending levels. “We didn’t do it at this late hour for drama,” Reid added, “We did because it’s been very hard to arrive at this point.”
“This has been a long fight,” Boehner said earlier in a press briefing, “but we fought to keep government spending down.”
A new spending bill has yet to be passed by Congress but a stopgap measure that will keep the government open through 14 April was rushed through both chambers. The stopgap, which includes $2 billion of the agreed cuts, is intended to buy enough time for the details of the larger deal to be worked out and enacted.
The deal means that government agencies that employ scientists and fund research across the US will continue their business as usual next week and that a host of closures, cancellations and other measures communicated to government employees on Friday in anticipation of a government-wide shutdown, can be filed under ‘P’ for ‘PHEW!’
One notable feature of the announced deal is the absence of any policy “riders” that Republicans had previously attached as conditions for passing a budget earlier in the week. One such rider would have prevented the Environmental Protection Agency from regulating emissions of greenhouse gasses.
The timing of the agreement, more than six months into the government’s 2011 fiscal year, means that the substantial spending cuts the deal calls for will need to be absorbed before October 1. Many departments and agencies have already been scaling back on programs to ease the expected transition to more a austere budget.
Follow Nature in the coming days for more on the new deal’s implications for US research.