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Comment by JustAnotherPat | Hacker News Reader

And the trend continues in which science funding increases under Republican administrations more than it does under Democrat ones. For all their talk, it really is a disappointingly low priority for Democrats.

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It's true that there is a weak correlation between the party of the administration and science funding, with funding being more under a Republican administration.

However, there is also a correlation between the House of Representatives and science funding, with funding being more under a Democratic House of Representatives.

(In the Senate, no correlation between party and funding)

If you look at where the science spending goes, the Republican administrations spend more than Democrats largely because they spend more on the military, and so military funded science goes up. Democratic administrations spend less on the military, but more on space, energy, and environmental science.

See: http://chicagopolicyreview.org/2015/11/09/do-democrats-alway...

This is true. A lot of my funding as a grad student in CS came from DARPA, which is part of the DOD.

Mostly because the Republicans cried crocodile tears about the deficit when a Democratic president was in office, but have no problem blowing up the deficit when a Republican is in office now or when Bush was in office. We're already over a trillion up in debt in the past year and trillions more expected for the tax giveaway in the next few years. And this is in good times when we should be paying down the debt, unlike the beginning of the decade when the US was in recession.

I believe Republican obstruction of productive stimulus spending extended the recession longer than it needed to soley for political reasons. Mitch McConnell openly stated his main goal was to prevent Obama from being relected.

I'm severely disappointed that most of this increased debt spending now is being forked over to a bloated black hole military budget.

https://www.nytimes.com/2010/03/17/us/politics/17mcconnell.h...

https://m.washingtontimes.com/news/2018/mar/15/donald-trump-...

Congress passes budgets, not the Administration (President). The current President loudly opposed the science funding increase before and after passage.

Most of the increase is due to Democrats.

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