It's bad news for the European Union’s massive research program. In an acrimonious meeting of the European Council to decide the EU’s general budget for 2014-2020, leaders of the Union’s 27 member states slashed the €77.6 billion research budget proposed by the European Commission in November 2011 back to €69.24 billion.
This may not be the very last word on the fate of the seven-year research programme, known as Horizon 2020. The European Union operates a complex co-decision making system, and budgets must also be agreed upon by the European Parliament. The Parliament is friendlier to European research policies than is the European Council — which gathers heads of government and tends to promote national interests.
The Parliament had earlier called for a mighty €100 billion budget for Horizon 2020.
But observers say that behind-the-scenes negotiations between the three bodies over the last months leave little room to hope that Parliament will fully rescue the research budget.
Horizon 2020 comprises a variety of different research programmes, including the highly regarded — and highly competitive — European Research Council, which awards large grants to individual researchers based exclusively on excellence. The Commission is not commenting on how it might apportion the cuts among programmes when the final budget is known.
The Council did set aside exact budgets for three large scientific infrastructure programmes outside Horizon 2020 however. It approved €6.3 billion for Galileo, Europe’s navigation satellite system, down only 10% on the Commission’s proposal. And it allocated €2.7 billion to the experimental nuclear fusion reactor ITER, which the Commission had originally proposed not funding.
Note EU-Digest: hopefully the European Parliament will put joint military projects on the back burner in favor of increasing budgets for Education and Science and Technology.
Read more: Europe's leaders slash research budget : Nature News & Comment
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