Behind The Mic With Joe Mathieu: Budget Deal Restores Research Funding

BOSTON (CBS) - It's 1,582 pages long and I've spent a good chunk of the morning reading it so you don't have to.

A bipartisan spending bill on Capitol Hill.

Nothing gets me going like a good budget and this will be the first time we've had one in years.

The headline is the government will not shut down Wednesday night like it did last year. To that end, lawmakers are expected to clear a stop-gap spending bill that will keep things running until the real budget is passed.

So, what's inside?

$1.1 trillion to fund departments and programs through the end of the year including a 1-percent pay raise for federal workers and military personnel. It also has tens of billions of dollars to restore HeadStart funding. And arguably, most important for the state of Massachusetts, hundreds of millions more in funding for health research - money that was cut in the sequester last year.

The National Institutes of Health gets $29.9 billion – a billion more than the agency received under the sequester budget cuts last March. Those cuts took money away from research programs in the state and officials say that resulted in job losses and arguably a weaker local economy.

I and many others will be interested to see if the opposite happens when the money is restored.

Follow Joe on Twitter @joemathieuwbz