What’s on my mind this month is how heavily Maryland, with its high concentration of bioscience and federal employees, relies on federal research and development funding. As I contemplated what to share in this issue of SOMnews — recognizing that this would go to press before the White House and Congress had, hopefully, reached an agreement on a budget — I was struck by the potentially ominous consequences of the impending fiscal cliff for the State of Maryland. If the “sequestration” clause of the Budget Control Act of 2011 was allowed to kick in, it would trigger an approximately eight percent across-the-board cut in federal discretionary spending. Although all states would be negatively impacted, perhaps no state in the U.S. would be more adversely affected than Maryland.
