There have apparently been a lot of funding activities going on, but the specifics aren’t immediately clear. For example, the amount of DOE available funding grew by 10 percent (!) to $11.04 billion and the NSF available funding grew 7 percent to $2.11 billion. Although the actual payouts at NSF showed little change, the DOE’s payouts increased by nearly $200 million. Neither agency is providing information about these increases in their news releases.
Hopefully this is the leading edge of the long-awaited science spending.
It looks like most of the voters in our poll think the DOE will cross the $1 billion mark after October. I think that is way off, so I am going to stick with the under bet and say they’ll get there before the end of September. Steven Chu – don’t fail me now.
Department of Energy (5.8% paid out):
National Science Foundation (1.2% paid out):
Source: Recovery.gov