Earlier today, ABC's Jake Tapper and Sunlen Miller forwarded President Obama's slam on Reagan and Bush over the swine-flu story: "Federal funding in the physical sciences as a portion of our gross domestic product has fallen by nearly half over the past quarter century." But once the ABC looked the data, they updated the post: they found the truth was more "complex" than President Obama's partisan spin:
But the picture is far more complex than just a line sloping down from President Reagan to President Bush.
Truth is, since peaking in 1964, federal funding on sciences as a percentage of GDP has gone down under every President, Democratic or Republican, except for Ronald Reagan. [Emphasis mine.]
On some level, this kind of measurement is unfair: if the economy grows nicely, funding could look like it’s shrinking as a percentage of GDP, even if it isn’t shrinking in real dollars. Here’s how ABC found the record since Dwight Eisenhower:
Federal sciences funding as a percentage of GDP* started increasing significantly under President Eisenhower, from .73% in 1953 to more than double that percentage 1.69% in 1960. Funding as a percentage of GDP peaked in 1964, at 1.92 percent under then-President Lyndon Johnson (no doubt with heavy input from his predecessor, President John F. Kennedy, as budgets are set a year prior)
The spending level was was 1.64% of GDP in President Johnson's last year in office, 1968.
It went down slightly under President Richard Nixon, from 1.55% in 1969 to 1.15% in 1974; and down to 1.11% in President Gerald Ford's last year in office, 1976. Funding went down from 1.09% in President Jimmy Carter's first year in office, 1977, to 1.07% in 1980.
But the number fluctuated a great deal under President Ronald Reagan -- starting at 1.08% in 1981, peaking at 1.25% in 1985, and ending with a net increase in 1988 at 1.18%.
Funding proceeded to decrease again under President George H.W. Bush (1.10% in 1989, 0.96% in 1992); President Bill Clinton (0.91% in 1993 to 0.68% in 2000); and President George W. Bush (0.72% in 2001, peaking in 2003 and 2004 at 0.76%, and lessening to 0.71% in 2007, the last year for which statistics were available.)
Obama's notion of a reduction in "nearly half" is mathematically close, but his idea that it represents "scientific research politicized in an effort to advance predetermined ideological agendas" looks like an airball when President Clinton's GDP percentage for science slipped. As if it wasn't already a political airball to suggest that if the swine flu sweeps in from Mexico, it can be blamed on the Reagan administration.
