At NSF, if the cuts are applied truly across the board, $500M would immediately be eliminated from the agency’s FY13 budget. In a scenario where the cuts are applied only to non-defense spending the NSF cuts could be just over $1B. It would be as if the NSF budget had regressed back to 2002 levels, basically wiping out a decade of growth. To further put these cuts into context, NSF’s total FY13 budget request for research and related activities is $5.7B, including $1.345B for the entire Math and Physical Sciences Directorate. One billion dollars is what the agency spends on major equipment and facilities construction and on education and human resources combined. It is by far larger than the Faculty Early Career Development and the Graduate Research Fellowship programs. And put one last way, the cuts would mean at least 2500 fewer grants awarded.

Under the sequestration scenario where defense and non-defense program bear the brunt of cuts equally, the DOE Office of Science could lose $362M immediately in FY13, while NNSA which funds Lawrence Livermore, Los Alamos, and Sandia national labs, would lose at least $300M. Again these cuts would be deeper if the Congress votes, and the President agrees to subject the cuts only to non-defense programs. The Office of Science cut is nearly equivalent to the requested FY13 budget for fusion energy research ($398M). The Office of Science had enjoyed a fair level of support in the past decade, but sequestration would take the agency back to FY08 spending levels or to FY00 if the cuts are applied to non-defense programs only.

NASA would immediately lose at least $763M with the Science Directorate losing nearly $250M. Again these cuts would be much deeper if distributed only to non-defense programs. In that scenario NASA would immediately lose $1.7B in FY13, more than the FY13 budget for James Webb Space Telescope ($627M) or the Astrophysics Division ($659M).