Question: When is a budget increase not an increase?
Answer: When it comes with strings attached.
If you have seen the operating plan for the NSF for FY 1999, you will have noted that the budgets of the centers and the grants programs within the astronomy division have increased by 4-5 percent, including the budget for NOAO. However, NOAO is also required to spend $1.425M on the construction of SOLIS, a facility for synoptic observations of the Sun. The net effect is a $200K decrease relative to last year in the budget for operating all other aspects of the NOAO program. If we allow for imposed increases in health care costs and for a 3 percent salary increase (all surveys show that our salaries, especially for technical and scientific staff, are much further behind our comparison groups than 3 percent), then the budget for this year falls short of maintaining last year's level of services by $1M. Since the increase requested for FY 2000 in the President's submission to Congress is 2.9 percent, we can expect no significant relief next year.
If the NOAO budget had merely kept pace with inflation since 1984, the year that the observatories were combined into a single organization, the budget would be $8.5M higher. What that means is that on average the budget has been reduced by an average of $570,000 every single year for 15 years. And we have managed to add GONG, WIYN, and support for US activities related to Gemini to the suite of programs that we carry out.
The percentage decrease is comparable or slightly smaller in the grants program and in the budgets for the other centers. Since NOAO represents about ¼ of the NSF astronomy budget, what this means is that, had astronomy funding simply maintained its purchasing power, the funding would be about $30M/year higher. That would be sufficient to fund nearly every NSF initiative that we have considered as a community, whether it is enhancing support for theory or increasing support for instrumentation. Indeed one might have expected that the enormous opportunities in astronomy should have led to increased support for the field as a whole, rather than the substantial decrease that has actually occurred.
Given my understanding of the budgets, I do not believe that NOAO management can identify a plan that will both reduce the budget to the level of funding that will likely be available in FY 2000 and be acceptable either to ourselves or to the user community. It is my conviction that the time has come to restructure NOAO in fundamental ways, and I plan to propose such restructuring to AURA within the next two months. The community will be kept fully informed in a timely way about restructuring plans.
Sidney C. Wolff