Put yourself in the shoes of a congressperson.

Or put yourself in the shoes of a Bush administration official. You've thrown huge increases at NIH in your first few years, and made what was at a minimum a good faith effort to compromise on stem cells, and gotten nothing but War On Science!!! and Looming Crisis!!! grief in return. Scientists continue to demonstrate the difference between being clever and being smart.

Incidentally, if I may reparent a late comment in an older post, I had to laugh at:

Stephen M. Strittmatter, a professor of neurology and neurobiology at Yale University's School of Medicine, told legislators that his laboratory's discovery of the NogoReceptor molecule occurred during NIH's budget-doubling period when he and other researchers were more willing to take risks. Today, he said, "researchers shy away from real discoveries. They've become worriers, not explorers."

Ohmigod, he was willing to screen an expression library with a ligand! What a risk taker! I mean, it was a nice paper but you'd think he had carried out one of the Mars rover landings.