Correction appended.

Last night's Republican wins in the House could roll federal energy and climate research funding back to 2008 levels, according to an analysis of GOP promises by the nonpartisan American Association for the Advancement of Science.

Patrick Clemins, director of the R&D Budget and Policy Program for AAAS, said an analysis of the research platform as laid out in the Republican Party's "Pledge to America" suggests research spending could be returned to fiscal 2008 levels.

"We will roll back government spending to pre-stimulus, pre-bailout levels," the Republican guidance document promises, in a pledge that gives some of the limited guidance on science funding seen this election season.

But, Clemins said, "Before they had the Pledge to America, John Boehner regularly had 2008 as the [reference] year," referring to statements by next year's likely House speaker from Ohio.

Clemins' analysis shows that a return to pre-stimulus funding -- the bailout had little impact on research dollars, he says -- could mean a cut of nearly 20 percent to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) as compared with the fiscal 2010 budget, and a 14 percent cut for the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST).

The Energy Department's Office of Science, another major funder of basic research, could be cut back 15 percent.

The U.S. Global Change Research Program, which funds climate science across 10 agencies, could be cut nearly 14 percent from its $2.1 billion fiscal 2010 budget to the $1.8 billion it received in fiscal 2008, he says.

Clemins said much of the decrease in research funding that agencies are likely to see comes from the Obama administration's budget-cutting exercises. The Defense Department faces a proposed cut of just over 5 percent for fiscal 2011, as compared with 2010 figures, in an effort to rein in overall budgets.

With an overall Obama administration focus on basic science research, the development end of the spectrum -- "moving from pure research to trying to actually build a product out of this newfound knowledge" -- has taken a hit, and the development-heavy Defense Department bears the brunt of it, Clemins said.

Much of the rest of the potential cuts, he said, come in what he called the America COMPETES agencies – the National Science Foundation (NSF), NIST and the DOE Office of Science -- which had been boosted to work on energy research under the America COMPETES Act. The law was passed under the George W. Bush administration, but NSF and the Office of Science did not receive significant research funding under the act until 2009.

Clemins said a Republican-controlled House might be expected to shift funding away from some of the Obama administration's renewables projects and back toward fossil fuel and nuclear work, perennial GOP favorites, but there has not been a public commitment to such a shift.

One concern, Clemins said, is that Republicans could try to claw back stimulus funds that have been promised to research work but not yet spent. The pledge document says "Congress should move immediately to cancel unspent stimulus funds," and Clemins said it is unclear how lawmakers might seek to implement that goal.

If Congress declined to fund follow-on years of research contracts that have already been started, time and money could be wasted, he said.

But that possibility seems remote. Last month, a Boehner spokesman said the Republicans would be targeting unobligated stimulus funds, not signed contracts.

Correction: An earlier version erroneously included NOAA instead of NSF among the America COMPETES agencies. It also stated that the law first received funding under President Obama; actually, while significant research funding for NSF and the Office of Science did not come through until 2009, funds were allocated to NIST before then.