EUROPEAN COMMISION PROPOSES 100 BILLION EURO SPENDING PLAN

 The European Commission yesterday proposed spending $120 billion on research between 2021 through to 2027 under its next continental science funding program. As much as this may sound over the line, it is still less than some research groups had hoped for. They still agreed that it is a good but not great opening bid in what is expected to be a lengthy negotiation between the European Parliament and the European Union's member states, which is expected to come up with a final spending plan.

 The 100 billion euro proposal, which represents a 50% increase compared to the preceeding period, includes 97.6 billion euros for Horizon Europe, 2.4 billion euros for the nuclear research program Euratom. The commission is currently proposing to devote 114.8bn euros to research and innovation. 

Once the negotiations are done, analysts predict the final amount for Horizon Europe will likely be less than the proposed $120 bn. Some member states often have the final word over the parliament, which has argued for an even bigger budget and have requested amounts in the region of $170 billion.
Before leaving his post a few months ago, the commission's top research official, former director general for research Robert Jan Smiths, said that he hoped for a120bn euro proposal. Some lobby groups, including the League of European Reasearch Universities (LERU), a group of influential universities, had even called for doubling the research budget. "To be clear, 100bn euro is a bare minimum for an ambitious, well-functioning [program] that will need to meet many challanges," says LERU's secretary general Kurt Deketelaere.

 European spending negotiations are usually protracted, but this could be a dawn of an extreme challange. One new challange would be accounting for the impact of Brexit, the UK's planned exit from the European Union which will see the UK no longer contributing to the EU's coffers. Regardless of the final amount agreed for Horizon Europe, the rate of inflation could affect actual spending. The commision asumes an inflation rate of 2% over the life of the program, but if it turns out to be higher, the funds available for research will shrink and vice versa. Also, the commission's actual outlays are often smaller than its initial budget commitments.

 The commission is expected to issue detailed proposals for each policy on 7 June, which will form the basis for another series of negotiations.