Washington remains configured for political gridlock after Tuesday’s elections, a fact which seems to portend two more years like the last two. But party leaders on both sides have indicated a willingness to work together in the new Congress, perhaps softening the hard line that built the so-called “fiscal cliff” towards which the country now hurtles. That willingness to compromise will be put to the test even before the new Congress is sworn in, as the lame duck session of the current Congress has two important deadlines looming before they can adjourn.

With both parties having wrapped up their presidential nominating conventions, Congress returns to Washington with much of the Federal budget process unfinished. The congressional leadership has already conceded that they will not finish FY 2013 appropriations before the end of this session, leaving the 12 unfinished annual appropriations bills for the next Congress to resolve. Congress also remains unresolved about what to do with pending across-the-board cuts to federal agencies and programs that are scheduled for January, 2, 2013. Those cuts, called for in the Budget Control Act of 2011 and triggered because Congress failed to agree on a plan to cut the Federal budget deficit, will happen unless Congress agrees to do something to stop them.

Despite relatively meager marks from the House and Senate for FY12 science budgets, a few key science agencies received a bit of a surprise in November when congressional appropriators provided final funding levels that exceeded those previously approved levels. The National Science Foundation and National Institute of Standards and Technology both will see increases in FY12 compared to FY11, and NASA, which had been slated for large cuts, will see those cuts mitigated somewhat. In the bill, NSF will see an increase of 2.5 percent versus its FY11 level, NIST will see an increase of $33 million, and NASA will see a decrease of $648 million-though markedly better than the $1.6 billion cut originally proposed.

As all of us are acutely aware, recent turmoil in the financial markets, near gridlock on Capitol Hill, uncertainty about long-term fiscal planning in Congress, and concerns about hesitancy in the job market are all converging to create a somewhat daunting perspective for computing research, and especially for funding for computing research, in the next few years.

While Congress worked to pass a last-minute debt-limit deal that could spell deep cuts for federal science agencies in FY13, members of the House Appropriations Committee approved legislation in mid-July that would provide a slight increase in research funding at the National Science Foundation in FY12, but cuts to education efforts at the Foundation and other science agencies within the bill.