Natalia Sudakova

• Affiliation: Institute for the U.S. and Canadian Studies, RAS
  
• Address: Russian Federation, Moscow

The budget policy during D. Trump's administration is followed by certain changes in the structure of federal budget spending, particularly federal expenditures on R&D. The President of the United States of America makes budget proposals, traditional for republicans, on increase in defense expenditures, giving preference to the developments financed by the U.S. Department of Defense. Efforts of the Congress on prevention of spending cuts to R&D, offered by the D. Trump's administration, led to the notable growth of federal R&D budget in FY 2018 and FY2019, as well as to saving science programs in the nondefense area important for economic development and innovations. The analysis of structure of federal budget spending showed that in many years as the discretionary budget goes, so goes the federal R&D budget. There are official long-term forecasts that the discretionary budget will continue to be reduced. In these conditions there are certain risks of declining of federal financial support for R&D, first of all, basic research and continuation of long-term trend of decrease in federal R&D funding as a share of U.S. GDP. It is established that since the end of the Cold War federal research funding portfolio has shifted away from the physical sciences and engineering toward the life sciences. But this is a serious concern because physical sciences and engineering play an important role in development of modern innovation and technologies. It is possible that the growing foreign competition in development of advanced technologies, weakening of some international positions of the USA in the innovation area will provide an impulse to the D. Trump's administration and Congress for changes of structure and amount of federal R&D expenditures. Among the budget priorities which are contained in a budget request of the White House for FY 2020, there are such directions of research as artificial intelligence, quantum information science, lunar exploration, competitive agricultural research and infrastructure, exascale computing, cybersecurity.