The ¥14 trillion supplementary budget for fiscal 2009 has a problematic feature. It allocates as much as ¥4.36 trillion — about 30 percent of the budget — to 46 funds, 30 of them newly established. Money in the funds can be used "flexibly" for more than a year, raising the possibility that bureaucrats will plan claptrap projects just to use up the money.
Among the funds is a ¥270 billion fund to support state-of-the-art scientific research. The government should exercise utmost care to ensure that the money is used for truly meaningful research projects that will broaden and strengthen the nation's scientific base.
The government created the fund as an economic stimulus measure proposed by the Japan Business Federation (Nippon Keidanren). The ¥270 billion amounts to about 1.5 times the annual subsidies doled out by the Japan Society for the Promotion of Science for scientific research. It could greatly affect the way scientific research is conducted in Japan.