Amid calls for peace and cuts in welfare, German Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder recently slipped a plug for science into a major speech, promising to raise the budgets of German research organizations 3% per year beginning in 2004. He acknowledged that this year's budget woes had hit research funding hard, but "that cannot remain so," he told parliament on 14 March.
Officials at the Max Planck Society, the DFG research funding agency, and other science organizations greeted the promise with guarded optimism. "It is important that it comes from the chancellor," says a DFG spokesperson, but she notes that the promised raise must still be approved by parliament and the German states.
Such pledges have been broken before. Research organizations were promised a 3% raise last July, but the federal government later announced that it wanted to freeze science budgets for 2003. Some state governments are still trying to win at least a small increase for DFG. The next chance to settle the dispute comes on 31 March, and observers predict that negotiators will settle for a 2.5% increase for DFG, with other science budgets remaining flat.
