Debt deal sets day of reckoning

摘要

Scalpel or guillotine? Those are the possible fates in store for US science funding after Congress and the White House reached a deal to cut federal spending and raise the nations self-imposed debt limit before a 2 August deadline. The product of tumultuous negotiations, the deal largely spares science in the short term but puts a day of reckoning on the horizon: 2 January 2013. If politicians cannot agree on how to improve the governments fiscal outlook by then through targeted cuts and other means - the scalpel option - their failure will automatically trigger the guillotine: a deep cut applied across a range of expenditures, including research. In the worst case, the automatic cuts could mean shuttered laboratories and mass lay-offs at universities.