[Mitch]

The budget will be decreased 2% to $5.47billion. Article can be found here sorry for those who don't have access. http://pubs.acs.org/isubscribe/journals/cen/82/i38/html/8238gov3.html

[movies]

That sucks a lot.  In that Q&A thing in Nature Kerry said he would double the amount of NSF fellowships offered.  No word on how he'd pay for it though.  Interesting plan though.  I wonder if providing so many more fellowships would harm the quality of the research that is funded though.  Wouldn't that cause the reviewers to be less selective?

[Mitch]

The research would still happen with the fellowship or not. Except more people would have the fellowships. I assume the prestige might go down but I have doubts whether the quality would.

[movies]

That's a good point.

[hmx9123]

A long time ago, in the 1940s-50s, our country dumped tons of funding into research.  While it's true that not all of the research was worthwhile, there was a lot of groundbreaking research that was done during this time that wouldn't have found funding under the current grant process.  I personally think that we need to do somewhat the same thing now, funding everything that we can in terms of education and research.  That is what will help our country the most, but it is a long-term fix and not a short-term fix that helps people get re-elected.