Debt deal sets day of reckoning: US science agencies avoid immediate pain but could be devastated by automatic cuts in 2013.

By: Eric Hand

....April Burke, president of Lewis–Burke Associates in Washington DC, a science-lobbying firm, is more sanguine, saying that an impasse would not necessarily trigger doomsday cuts. Congress, a slippery beast, has devised ways to avoid automatic triggers before. And the 2 January 2013 implementation of the mandated cuts is a political lifetime away. By then, the 2012 election could have changed the political stage, along with its players. The economy could improve — or get worse. And new rules could be written.

"I don't think we're looking at the full menu of what might happen then," she says. "I think there might be yet another reality." 

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