[In Depth] A longer spending freeze?
This week Congress returned for a short lame-duck session expected to be dominated by a debate over spending for the 2017 fiscal year that began on 1 October. All agency budgets are frozen at 2016 levels under what is called a continuing resolution (CR), and Republican lawmakers must decide whether to finish work on the 2017 budget before Christmas, setting specific levels for each agency, or to extend the CR beyond Inauguration Day on 20 January 2017. A CR prohibits starting new programs or expanding existing initiatives. At the National Institutes of Health, for example, a freeze would stall high-profile Obama initiatives in precision medicine, neuroscience, and cancer. At the Department of Energy, it would delay proposed spending increases on high-performance computing and a new neutrino experiment. The National Science Foundation faces an even more complicated scenario. It wants to build two midsized ships to upgrade the academic research fleet....