Recent news of President Trump’s budget request for fiscal year 2021 has been of great concern to the University of Tennessee research community. Earlier this week, the White House released a 138-page overview of the president’s budget request. This is the first step in a long process to approve a federal budget. The House and Senate must pass budget resolutions, send it to appropriation committees, vote on those resolutions, and then the president must sign each appropriation for the budget to become law. Ideally, this last step is approved by October 1.
So, this is far from the final version of the federal budget. As you may recall, Congress did not pass the final, approved budget for FY20 until December 16, 2019. Continue reading