Nearly a month after avoiding a September shutdown, congressional leaders and the White House produced the Bipartisan Budget Act of 2015, a two-year deal to partially roll back the spending caps and to increase discretionary spending in FY2016 by 5.2%.The deal allows federal agencies to avoid a return to sequestration-level spending and suspends the debt ceiling for over a year. The agreement should be a boon to federal science agencies, which had been operating with relatively modest appropriations during the summer. To fully understand the contours of the deal, it's worth taking a short stroll back in time. When the Budget Control Act was signed into law in 2011, it first established an original spending cap baseline and created a joint congressional committee to come up with some kind of trillion-dollar grand bargain to further reduce deficits. When the congressional committee failed to reach an agreement, the Budget Control Act required sequestration to kick in, resulting in across-the-board cuts in FY 2013, and capping federal agencies at a new lower spending baseline for the rest of the decade. This would have resulted in tens of billions of dollars of cumulative cuts in the federal R&D budget.
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机译：在避免9月停工近一个月后，国会领导人和白宫制定了2015年《两党预算法》（Bipartisan Budget Act of 2015），这项为期两年的协议旨在部分削减支出上限并将2016财年的可自由支配支出增加5.2％。避免退回固定资产支出的机构，并将债务上限暂停一年以上。该协议对联邦科学机构来说是一个福音，后者在夏季以相对适度的拨款运作。为了充分了解交易的内容，值得回顾一下时间。当《预算控制法》于2011年签署成为法律时，它首先建立了原始的支出上限基准，并成立了一个联合国会委员会，以提出某种数万亿美元的议价协议，以进一步减少赤字。当国会委员会未能达成协议时，《预算控制法》要求实行隔离措施，从而在2013财年全面削减开支，并在接下来的十年中将联邦机构的开支上限限制在新的较低水平。这将导致联邦研发预算累计削减数百亿美元。
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