The NSF is a U.S. government agency, and the money that it provides for scientific research comes from tax dollars. In 2013, the budget of the NSF was $7.3 billion. For comparison, the federal budget allocation for the Department of Agriculture—the people responsible for supervising food imports and exports—was about three times that amount. Each year, the U.S. government spends twice as much on its space program as it does on all of its other scientists put together: NASA’s 2013 budget was more than $17 billion. And these discrepancies are nothing compared with the disparity between research
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