Highlights
- This week,
the House is set to approve a budget bill that would match the FY 2005
request for the National Institutes of Health (NIH) of $28.8 billion,
a 2.6 percent increase to $28.8 billion (see Table
1).
- Most NIH institutes would receive increases in a narrow range between
2.8 and 3.3 percent; there would be no clear favorites, unlike the
past two years when biodefense research was
heavily favored.
- NIH research (basic and applied) would increase 2.5 percent to $27.7
billion, far below the growth rates of the past six years.
- The House plan would confirm NIH estimates that the total number of NIH
Research Project Grants (RPGs) would barely
increase next year by 1.4 percent; the number of new grants would
rise slightly, but only back to last year’s level after falling this
year. The RPG proposal success rate would fall to 27 percent in 2004
and stay there in 2005, down from 30 percent last year. The average
grant size would rise just 1.3 percent, well below the 3.5 percent expected
inflation rate for biomedical research.
- The report accompanying
the bill contains language urging NIH to make scientific journal articles
resulting from NIH-funded research publicly available. In response,
NIH has begun to formulate a new policy for public access to journal
articles.
- R&D in the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) would
rise 2.9 percent to $29.3 billion. Although less than the request, the
House would boost R&D substantially in the Food and Drug Administration
(FDA) and the Office of the HHS Secretary for biodefense
(see Table 2).
NIH R&D in FY 2005 House Appropriations
This week, the
House of Representatives is debating a Labor-HHS appropriations bill
(HR 5006) that would give $28.8 billion to the National Institutes of
Health (NIH) in FY 2005. The full House is expected to approve the bill
on September 9. The House would match NIH’s
requested 2.6 percent increase for the total budget, with each institute
receiving the amount requested (see Table 1).
NIH classifies 97 percent of its budget as R&D, including R&D
facilities (the remainder is for overhead costs and research training).
The House plan would provide $27.9 billion for NIH R&D, also a 2.6
percent increase over this year. (For details of the NIH request, see
Chapter 8 of AAAS
Report XXIX: R&D FY 2005 or the February
20 AAAS R&D Funding Update).
NIH and the NIH
community are adjusting to diminished expectations after years of favored
treatment. After a completed five-year doubling campaign involving 15
percent increases for each of the five years between 1998 and 2003 (see
Figure 1), biomedical researchers hoped for a ‘soft landing’ in following
years, or a gradual easing into slower growth rates. Instead, growth
has slowed dramatically. NIH enjoyed steady budget growth over the past
several decades, as shown in Figure 1, but growth accelerated sharply
after FY 1998 and continued to FY 2003 during the five-year NIH doubling
campaign. But then growth slowed down to just ahead of the inflation
rate in FY 2004, and would slow down some more in FY 2005 in the NIH
request and the House plan. There was political pressure for Congress
to approve an increase for NIH larger than the 2.6 percent proposal,
but the House Appropriations Committee was stymied by tight restraints
on overall domestic discretionary spending proposed by the President
and affirmed by the House in its budget resolution.
Figure 1. (click
on the image to view or download a color, full-size PDF version of the
chart)
Most NIH institutes would receive increases in a narrow range between
2.8 and 3.3 percent within the tight overall funding environment
(see Table 1). There would be no clear favorites,
unlike the past two years when biodefense research, mostly in the National Institute of Allergy
and Infectious Diseases (NIAID), was heavily favored.
The majority of
NIH’s budget is distributed to external performers through
Research Project Grants (RPGs), which are
investigator initiated, peer reviewed, and competitively awarded (see
Figure 2). The
House appropriation and the request would allow RPG funding to increase
by 2.7 percent in FY 2005 to reach $14.9 billion. These funds would
support a record 37,744 RPGs, an increase
of 515 awards over FY 2004 (up 1.4 percent; see Figure 2). Because RPGs
are multi-year grants, the number of new grants initiated in FY 2005
would be far smaller. In FY 2005, the number of new grants would rise
slightly to 10,393, but only back to the FY 2003 level after falling
this year.
The success rate for new grant applications would dip to 27 percent
in FY 2004 and would stay there in FY 2005, down from a high of 32 percent
in FY 2001 (see Figure 2) and the lowest since FY 1995 because of recent
surges in the number of applications outpacing the number of grants
awarded. Although the number of RPGs has increased
from 25,000 in the early ‘90s to more than 35,000 (see Figure 2), the
number of grant applications has increased so fast that the success
rate is now well below the success rates of the NIH doubling period
1998-2003 when they exceeded 30 percent.
The House plan would result in nearly every institute funding a smaller
percentage of proposals in FY 2005 than in the past, despite the recent
doubling of the NIH budget. Expected success rates vary by institute,
each of which conducts its own grant solicitation process, from a low
of 15 percent (NIBIB) to a not-so-high rate of 33 percent (NHLBI and
NIDDK). Among the largest institutes, the National Cancer Institute
(NCI) expects a success rate of just one in four applications (24 percent),
down steadily from 33 percent in 1998 before the doubling campaign.
The National Heart, Lung and Blood Institute (NHLBI)’s 33 percent success
rate may be high among the institutes in FY 2005, but would be down
from 36 percent three years ago. Even the National Institute of Allergy
and Infectious Diseases (NIAID), whose budget has grown the most dramatically
recently, has seen the pool of applications grow even faster so that
its 27 percent expected success rate in FY 2005 would represent a steady
downward trend from 43 percent in 1997, again before the NIH doubling
campaign. In fact, every NIH
institute (except NIEHS) would have a lower success rate in FY 2005
than in at least one of the years just before the NIH doubling campaign.
Figure 2. (click
on the image to view or download a color, full-size PDF version of the
chart)
Even for successful applicants,
there would be some disappointments in the budget. The 1.3 percent average increase for all grants between FY 2004 and FY
2005 would just match the expected rate of inflation for the economy as a whole
(see Figure 2), but would fall behind the NIH-calculated Biomedical
Research and Development Price Index (BRDPI) that attempts to calculate the
inflation rate for goods and services purchased by the NIH budget. Recently,
NIH calculated the BRDPI increase for FY 2005 to be 3.5 percent. In recent
years, the BRDPI inflation rate has outpaced the economy-wide inflation rate by
more than 2 percent a year. (AAAS, and the federal government, uses the
economy-wide GDP deflator to adjust R&D dollars for inflation.)
The average size of competing RPGs, however,
would decline in FY 2005. The average new grant at $347,300 would
be 0.6 percent below the expected average of $349,300 this year, though
slightly above the $338,600 average of last year. Much of the decline
is due to an unusual number of large, one-time grants in FY 2004, according
to NIH; the average new multi-year grant would be 1.0 percent larger.
NIH would fund $258 million in R&D facilities and capital equipment
in FY 2005, up 14.2 percent from this year but a sharp drop from
$1.1 billion last year. Much of this funding comes from the Buildings
and Facilities account, which would hold steady at $100 million in FY
2005; in 2003, this account was $639 million because of a major investment
in biodefense facilities construction. The
B&F appropriation funds intramural construction at NIH facilities,
while in the NIAID budget there would be $150 million for extramural
construction grants to build an additional 20 extramural biosafety
(level 3) laboratories around the nation. The House would go along with
this proposal, and last week President Bush signed into law the Project
Bioshield Act (Public Law 108-276) that increases
the federal share of these NIAID-funded projects to 75 percent from
the current 50 percent. The NIAID funding would be the second phase
after a one-year pause in FY 2004; in FY 2003, NIAID initiated the first
round of extramural biosafety facilities construction
with $373 million mostly for BSL-4 facilities.
The House
would go along with NIH plans to discontinue a $119 million program
for extramural construction in the National Center for Research
Resources (NCRR) in FY 2005, leaving NCRR the only NIH institute to
see its budget decline (down 7.2 percent to $1.1 billion). There was
a similar proposal last year, but Congress added back these competitively
awarded construction grants in the FY 2004 appropriations process; the
fate of this program now rests with the Senate. The House would provide
the requested $222 million in FY 2005 for another NCRR program, the
Institutional Development Award (IDeA) program, up from $215 million
in FY 2004. IDeA provides support to enhance the research capacities
of 23 states that have been underrepresented in winning NIH funds in
the past.
The House bill contains only minor quibbles with NIH's policies. The
bill's accompanying language denies NIH's request to fully fund the
multi-year costs of selected grants entirely in the FY 2005 budget;
instead, NIH must continue to fund all grants year by year except for
a few small grants. NIH made a similar request last year, also denied.
The bill also contains an annually renewed provision prohibiting NIH
from funding human embryo research or any research in which human embryos
would be destroyed.
The House
bill contains language that could change how NIH-funded research is
published. The report accompanying the bill includes nonbinding
language calling on NIH to outline a policy by December to allow public
access to all NIH-funded research results. Since the language first
came to light in July, NIH has already held a number of meetings with
scientific journal publishers and other interested groups. Last week,
NIH published a notice announcing a draft policy for public comment
that would respond to the report language. The draft policy would require
that "grantees and supported Principal Investigators provide the
NIH with electronic copies of all final version manuscripts upon acceptance
for publication if the research was supported in whole or in part by
NIH funding." NIH would then archive the manuscript in its PubMed
Central database six months after publication, making it freely available
to the public. Public comments will be accepted until early November.
(See http://grants1.nih.gov/grants/guide/notice-files/NOT-OD-04-064.html
for more on this issue.) Several scientific publishers, including AAAS
(publisher of Science) are sending letters to key House members urging
Congress to forego a legislative solution and let NIH's public review
process determine the outcome, out of concern that granting immediate
free access to scientific journal articles could undermine the financial
foundations of scientific publishing. It is unclear at this time whether
the Senate will weigh in on this issue.
NIH Priority Areas
The
House would provide the necessary funds to carry out NIH plans to expand
its Roadmap for Medical Research. Last year, NIH Director Elias
Zerhouni introduced a Roadmap for Medical Research involving all the
NIH institutes and centers and aimed at three areas of NIH research:
improving clinical research (dubbed "Re-engineering the Clinical
Research Enteprise"), encouraging interdisciplinary research ("Research
Teams of the Future"), and providing new knowledge and research
tools to assist other researchers ("New Pathways to Discovery").
Congress approved $12 million in the Office of the Director (OD) to
begin the Roadmap, but with contributions from the other ICs and other
OD funds total Roadmap funding is $128 million this year. The House
and NIH would agree to nearly double Roadmap funding to $237 million
in FY 2005 with $60 million coming from OD. The other ICs' contributions
would be 0.63 percent of their FY 2005 budgets.
Biodefense R&D continues to be a high priority in the NIH portfolio. NIH
identifies $1.8 billion for biodefense R&D
in FY 2005, up 4.5 percent from this year. As recently as two years
ago, the NIH investment was only $162 million.
Most NIH biodefense R&D is funded
by the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID),
which became the second-largest NIH institute in the aftermath of the
fall 2001 anthrax attacks. NIAID would continue to award biodefense
research grants in FY 2005, complete the establishment of 10 extramural
Regional Centers of Excellence in Biodefense
and Emerging Infectious Disease Research (RCE) with the designation
of the final 2 centers, provide $150 million for the second phase of
extramural construction grants for biosafety level (BSL) 3 and 4 laboratories around the nation,
and conduct animal and clinical trials of various candidate vaccines.
In addition to funds in the NIH budget, there would be an additional
$47 million in new funds from the Office of the (HHS) Secretary for
NIH to spend on developing medical countermeasures against nuclear or
radiological terrorist attacks.
HIV/AIDS research is another priority in the budget. The NIH HIV/AIDS
R&D portfolio would expand 2.8 percent in FY 2005 to reach $2.9
billion. The majority ($1.5 billion) of this research would be funded
by NIAID, the lead institute for AIDS research. Included in the FY 2005
budget and affirmed by the House is $100 million (the same as FY 2003
but down $50 million from this year) to be transferred 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.
R&D
in other HHS Agencies
Although 95 percent of total R&D
funding at the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) comes from
the NIH, there is also significant research funded by other HHS agencies
(see Table 2). Funding at the Centers
for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) is primarily aimed at non-R&D
activities such as public health and health promotion activities and
more recently in biodefense for programs such
as increasing state and local preparedness and improving security, but
CDC also has a strong intramural research program at CDC laboratories.
The House would provide $532 million for CDC R&D activities, up
2.1 percent from FY 2004. CDC (and NIH) also receive
research funds from the Office of the HHS Secretary (see Table
2) for a variety of biodefense-related
research activities; these activities would jump 55 percent to $189
million in the House plan.
Outlook and Next Steps
The House Labor-HHS
bill is expected to clear the House this week (Sept. 9). The Senate
Appropriations Committee has not even drafted a timetable for its version
of the bill. Thus, the bill is almost certain to be included in a year-end
omnibus appropriations bill, which could be delayed until well after
October 1.
(This analysis is one of a series
of AAAS R&D Funding Updates on the FY 2005 congressional appropriations
process. The complete series of AAAS R&D Funding Updates, including
continually updated analyses of R&D in FY 2005 appropriations, is
available on the AAAS R&D Web Site
(http://www.aaas.org/spp/rd) in the “FY 2005
R&D” or the “What’s New” sections.)
- July 28, 2004 (revised September 9)
AAAS R&D Budget and Policy Program
1200 New York Ave, NW
Washington, DC 20005
(202) 326-6607; -6600
www.aaas.org/spp/rd
