This article presents compelling reasons why President George W. Bush decided to double federal funds for agencies supporting physical-science research. The biggest beneficiaries of Mr. Bush's plan for 2008 would be the National Science Foundation and the Department of Energy's Office of Science. Those agencies, together with the National Institute of Standards and Technology's in-house laboratories, would get $11.4-billion. That is about 17 percent more than they received in 2006, the last year for which Congress has completed appropriations, and it reflects a pace sufficient to sustain the doubling drive that President Bush first proposed in his 2007 budget. Raising this spending, Mr. Bush said in his State of the Union address last year, was essential to enhancing the nation's global economic competitiveness by increasing the production of high-technology goods.