Although it’s still early in the 2008 presidential campaign, Sen. Hillary Clinton released a detailed white paper today with proposals on science education and economic competitiveness. Her suggested spending increases for training scientists and for research contained some notable differences from proposals now before Congress.

In particular, Ms. Clinton, a New York Democrat who is the front-runner for the Democratic nomination, proposed a spending increase of 50 percent over 10 years for basic research at the National Science Foundation and at the Departments of Defense and Energy. That appeared to differ from a provision of competitiveness bills in both chambers of Congress that so far have drawn bipartisan support. Those bills would authorize a doubling of spending for the NSF and the Energy Department’s Office of Science over the next decade. In contrast, Senator Clinton’s proposal for a 50-percent increase over a decade would only modestly outpace inflation.

What’s more, Ms. Clinton would increase the budget of the National Institutes of Health by 50 percent over five years, while the bills in Congress are mum about the NIH. Some lawmakers believe the NIH now enjoys a healthy budget because they doubled it from 1998 to 2003. But since the doubling ended, the NIH’s budget — the largest single source of money for university research — has increased annually by less than the rate of inflation, prompting biomedical scientists to sound alarms that their research will be slowed. Senator Clinton’s statement picked up on those worries.

She also suggested tripling the number of graduate fellowships offered by the NSF, to about 3,000 annually, and increasing the student stipend by one-third, to $40,000. —Jeffrey Brainard