As part of a rush to draft
all 13 FY 2003 appropriations bills before a month-long August recess,
the Senate Appropriations Committee approved on July 18 its version
of a bill (S 2766) that provides funding for the Departments of Labor,
Health and Human Services, and Education (hereafter referred to as the
Labor/HHS bill). The Senate Labor/HHS bill would provide $27.3
billion in FY 2003 for the National Institutes of Health (NIH). This represents an increase of 15.9 percent or $3.7 billion above the
FY 2002 funding level, and would complete the campaign to double the
NIH budget between FY 1998 and FY 2003 (see Table
1). The total is $25 million above the Bush Administration request.
[The full Senate is scheduled to debate the bill in September.]
NIH R&D, which makes
up 97 percent of the NIH budget, would total $26.4 billion (up 16.2
percent). The remaining 3 percent of the NIH budget would go to research
training and overhead costs.
The Senate’s proposed 15.9
percent increase, and the Administration request, would follow increases
of nearly 15 percent in each of the last four years. The past four years’
increases were intended by Congress to be the first four installments
of a plan to double the NIH budget over five years beginning in FY 1998.
Although President Clinton never embraced the plan and never requested
the increases needed each year to achieve the goal, President Bush made
finishing the doubling effort a presidential campaign promise. The FY
2003 Bush request would provide the final installment of the doubling
plan with a request of $27.2 billion; the Senate would meet the goal
and go $25 million higher to reach $27.3 billion.
The National Institutes
of Health (NIH), an agency within the Department of Health and Human
Services (HHS), is the second-largest supporter of R&D in the federal
government after the Department of Defense (DOD). It is by far the largest
supporter of basic research, applied research, and R&D at colleges
and universities, and has a disproportionate impact on support for the
life and medical sciences and other fields.
The strong growth
in the NIH budget would not be as evenly distributed as in previous
years because of increased priority-setting in the FY 2003 budget and
the identification of three high-priority needs for additional investment:
bioterrorism, facilities construction, and cancer.
The Senate would stick closely to the request in allocating additional
resources to these areas (see Table 1 for
NIH appropriations by institute).
·
NIH
support of bioterrorism R&D would increase
five-fold to reach $1.5 billion in FY 2003, up from only $275 million
in FY 2002. The Senate would trim slightly the request for $1.7 billion.
In FY 2003, NIH would become the lead research agency in the burgeoning
federal effort to combat bioterrorism, in
a profound shift from DOD’s traditional lead role dating back to when
bioterror concerns were focused on military
troops rather than the U.S.
civilian population. Most of the new funds would go to the National
Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAIAD), which would receive
a boost of 47.1 percent in its overall budget to $3.7 billion as NIH’s
lead institute for bioterrorism R&D. Roughly
$1 billion would go to basic and applied research aimed at developing
biomedical tools to detect, prevent, and treat infection by biological
agents. NIAID would also receive $150 million in R&D facilities
funds for construction of new biosafety laboratories. (The remaining bioterrorism
funds would go to the Buildings and Facilities account (see below)).
Recently, the Bush Administration
proposed to transfer the NIH bioterrorism
R&D portfolio to the proposed Department of Homeland Security
(DHS). The Administration legislation would not transfer any employees
or laboratories to DHS. Instead, DHS would take control of the $1.7
billion requested R&D portfolio and transfer these funds to NIH
for distribution through existing NIH grant and laboratory infrastructures.
DHS would, however, gain the authority to set the bioterrorism research agenda in consultation with HHS. The
proposal is currently under consideration in the House and Senate; there
is some opposition to the proposed transfer, so it is still unclear
whether the bioterrorism portfolio will stay in the NIH budget. In the
meantime, the Senate appropriation would provide these funds directly
to NIH. (For more information on the Administration’s proposed Department
of Homeland Security, please see the June 21 AAAS
R&D Funding Update on DHS.)
·
The
Senate would nearly double the NIH Buildings and Facilities appropriation,
as requested, for a total of $633 million (up from $326 million). The
FY 2003 total would be nearly quadruple the FY 2001 investment of $161
million; funding for this account soared last year because of the infusion
of counter-terrorism emergency funds. The FY 2003 funds would continue
to address bioterrorism and laboratory security needs. There would be
funds for improved NIH laboratory security ($80 million); a new laboratory
in Fort Detrick,
Maryland, for bioterrorism
research ($105 million); a new laboratory on the NIH campus to study
infectious agents ($186 million); and the last installment of funds
for the NIH Neuroscience
Research Center
($168 million). There would also be construction funds in other accounts.
In addition to the $150 million for bioterrorism-related
facilities in NIAID (see above), there would be $125 million for extramural,
competitively awarded facilities construction grants in the National
Center for Research Resources (NCRR), up from $110 million in FY 2002.
In total, counting facilities funding in all NIH institutes, the NIH
investment in R&D facilities would be $922 million in FY 2003 under
the Senate plan, double the FY 2002 level.
·
Cancer is a high priority in the FY 2003
budget. The National Cancer Institute
(NCI) would receive the requested amount of $4.6 billion in the
Senate bill, an increase of 12.5 percent. Combined with cancer-related
research in other institutes, total NIH cancer research would exceed
$5 billion in FY 2003.
·
The Senate bill would, as requested,
provide funds from NIAID to the Global
Fund to Fight HIV/AIDS, Malaria, and Tuberculosis – an international
public-private partnership to provide grants for the prevention, treatment,
and cure of these diseases. The Senate bill would provide $100 million
in FY 2003 for this fund, the same as FY 2002. (The Agency for International
Development (AID) contributes another $100 million in FY 2002, and proposes
to contribute the same amount in FY 2003; the Senate would provide $200
million). The Global Fund was in the spotlight at the recent 14th
International AIDS Conference in Barcelona,
Spain; although
plans called for the fund to spend $10 billion a year from the leading
industrial nations and private contributors, contributions have so far
fallen far short of the goal. [The FY 2002 supplemental appropriations
bill signed into law on August 2 provides another $100 million in FY
2002 for the Fund through AID.]
·
The
Senate would increase funding for the National Center for Research Resources (NCRR) by 17.7 percent to $1.2 billion. NCRR
is charged with developing and supporting critical research technologies
and shared resources that underpin biomedical research. One beneficiary
of these increases in NCRR funding would be the Institutional Development
Award (IDeA) program, a program that provides capacity-building assistance
for biomedical research in states that have not previously participated
fully in the research programs of NIH. The Senate bill would provide
$220 million for IDeA – up sharply from $160
million in FY 2002 and $100 million in FY 2001. IdeA,
established in FY 1993, has grown dramatically in the past few years
and is open to proposals from 23 states and Puerto Rico.
It is similar in intent to the National Science Foundation’s Experimental
Program to Stimulate Competitve Research (EPSCoR).
NCRR also funds extramural facilities construction (see above; $125
million).
·
Most
of the other institutes would receive increases between 8 and 12 percent.
The Senate would mostly add on to institutes’ requests (which proposed
increases between 8 and 9 percent) by cutting some of the NIAID bioterrorism
request and distributing the funds to the other institutes.
Among other HHS agencies, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) would see its R&D
budget increase by 1.4 percent to $600 million, over an FY 2002
total already inflated by emergency counter-terrorism appropriations
(see Table 2). In the aftermath of last
fall’s anthrax attacks, the CDC received substantial sums of emergency
money, mostly for non-R&D activities such as procuring vaccines
or improving security at CDC facilities, but also for CDC’s anthrax
and other bioterrorism R&D efforts. While
most of CDC’s bioterrorism R&D would shift
to NIH in FY 2003, the agency would continue some R&D efforts in
its own laboratories. The largest R&D unit in CDC is the National
Institute for Occupational Safety and Health (NIOSH), which would have
an R&D budget of $253 million in the Senate bill (same as FY 2002).
Some of CDC’s anthrax research would be funded through the Office of
the Secretary in an $18 million transfer of funds out of a total R&D
appropriation of $43 million (down 33 percent from FY 2002). Most other
HHS agencies would see cuts in their R&D budgets; one exception
would be the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality (AHRQ), up 2.0
percent to $255 million. AHRQ’s programs evaluate
the quality and delivery of health care services, fund research on health
care outcomes, and explore ethnic and racial health care disparities.
The Senate version of the Labor/HHS bill
now awaits floor debate and approval by the full Senate. [Floor debate
will take place in September.] The House has not drafted its version
of the bill; the House has drafted 6 of the 13 bills and had originally
planned to make the Labor/HHS bill one of the last to be drafted. But
last week, House conservatives won a promise from House appropriators
to make the Labor/HHS bill the first bill after the August recess to
be drafted. After Labor Day, House appropriators will have a difficult
time drafting the bill because the House allocation for the bill is
more than $4 billion below the Senate total of $134.1 billion; under
such a constrained total the House Appropriations Committee may find
it impossible to write a bill that can win a majority of votes for passage.
If they do succeed, it may be at the cost of shortchanging several programs
such as the NIH appropriation, a tempting target because of its large
requested increase.
- July 24, 2002 (revised August 5)
AAAS R&D Budget and Policy Program
American Association for the Advancement of Science
1200 New York Ave, NW
Washington, DC 20005
(202) 326-6607
science_policy@aaas.org
http://www.aaas.org/spp/rd
(new URL)
