EUGENE Ore. — The stakes are high for the University of Oregon and Oregon State University if the impending automatic, across-the-board cuts to the federal budget are not averted by Congress and President Barack Obama.
That’s because the schools are among the top 100 research universities of 4,000 nationally, according to the Carnegie Classification system. The federal government pays the biggest chunk of the research done at Oregon universities, and they stand to lose, together, upwards of $28 million in 2013, should up to 10 percent of the federal budget be stripped on Jan. 2, as required by current law.
And the impact of these cuts would be felt beyond the universities, said Barry Toiv, spokesman for the Association of American Universities.
“Research is something most everybody realizes that the country has to do, and if we do more of it, we’ll all be better off, whether it’s the economy, whether there’s more cures for diseases, alternative forms of energy all kinds of things,” he said.
Federal funds, for example, paid for basic research for the Internet, GPS and lasers, improvements to crop yields and discovery of medical cures. “Most economists would suggest that we should be spending more not less on research,” Toiv said. “Here we go undermining it at a time we should be increasing it.”
This is the so called “fiscal cliff” created by law last year in order to avoid an incident of national default because congressional Democrats and Republicans could not reach agreement on taxes and spending changes meant to address the national debt, which is more than $16 trillion.
But if leaders don’t change course by January, expect deep cuts locally to research funded by such agencies as the National Institutes of Health, the National Science Foundation and the U.S. Department of Energy, university officials say.
