Highlights
- The House Appropriations
Committee has drafted an FY 2006 budget for the National Institutes
of Health (NIH) that would essentially agree to NIH’s
request for $28.7 billion next year, an increase of $143 million or
0.5 percent (see Table 1). NIH R&D would
rise 0.5 percent to $27.9 billion, failing to keep pace with general
inflation for the first time in 24 years.
- The
House appropriation would continue the recent trend of the NIH budget
falling behind its own calculations of biomedical research inflation,
estimated at 3.3 percent this year and 3.2 percent in 2006.
- Most NIH institutes would receive increases of between 0.3 and 0.7 percent
in the House plan.
- The House would depart from the
request by adding $97 million in medical countermeasures R&D formerly
funded in the Office of the HHS Secretary to the NIH Office of the Director
budget, and by subtracting $100 million in funding for the Global Fund to Fight HIV/AIDS, Malaria, and
Tuberculosis from the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases
(NIAID) budget to move to the Agency for International Development.
- The largest percentage increase
would go to the Office of the Director (OD; up 35 percent) for the transferred
biodefense R&D but also to boost OD funding for clinical
research, high-risk basic research, and collaborative research in the
NIH Roadmap for Biomedical Research.
- NIH research (basic and applied) would increase 1.1 percent to $27.8
billion in the House plan.
- NIH projects a decline in the number of Research Project Grants (RPGs) for the second
year in a row, no inflation adjustment for most new or continuing grants,
and a decline in the RPG success rate for the fifth year in a row down
to 21 percent.
- R&D in the other Department
of Health and Human Services (HHS) agencies combined would fall $172
million or 13.2 percent to $1.1 billion (see Table
2). Most of the overall cut, however, would be due to the transfer
of biodefense R&D from the Office of the
Secretary to NIH.
NIH R&D in FY 2006 House Appropriations
On June 16, the House Appropriations
Committee of Representatives continued work on FY 2006 appropriations
by approving its version of the FY 2006 Labor-HHS-Education appropriations
bill. The bill is scheduled for debate and expected approval by the
full House later this week. The House Labor-HHS bill would provide $28.7
billion for the NIH budget in FY 2006, essentially the same as the
request and a 0.5 percent increase over FY 2005 (see Table
1). All but two institutes would receive the requested amounts.
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 0.5 percent increase over this
year. (For details of the NIH request, see Chapter
8 of AAAS
Report XXX: R&D FY 2006 or the March
4 AAAS R&D Funding Update). NIH support of basic and applied
research would grow slightly faster than total R&D with a 1.1 percent
increase because of a drop in R&D facilities funding.
After a completed five-year doubling
campaign involving 15 percent increases for each of the five years between
1998 and 2003, biomedical researchers hoped for a gradual easing into
slower growth rates. But growth in the NIH budget slowed sharply to
3.2 percent in 2004, and slowed even further to just 2.0 percent in
2005. Tight restraints on overall domestic spending would push NIH budget
growth down to just 0.5 percent next year in both the request and the
House plan. If the House plan prevails in the final FY 2006 budget,
FY 2006 would be the first time
in 24 years that the NIH R&D portfolio would fail to keep pace with
inflation in the economy as a whole after just barely staying ahead
of inflation in 2004 and 2005 (see Figure 1). NIH has already fallen
behind its own Biomedical Research and Development Price Index (BRDPI),
an index that attempts to calculate the inflation rate for goods and
services purchased by the NIH budget. Recently, NIH projected the BRDPI
increase for FY 2006 to be 3.2 percent after a 3.3 percent increase
in 2005. In recent years, the BRDPI inflation rate has outpaced the
economy-wide inflation rate by roughly 2 percent a year. (AAAS and the
federal government use the economy-wide GDP deflator to adjust R&D
dollars for inflation.)
Figure 1. (click on the image for PDF)
Most NIH institutes would receive increases in a narrow range between
0.3 and 0.7 percent within the tight overall funding environment.
The National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID), home
to NIH’s biodefense effort, would decline
by 1 percent to $4.4 billion, but only because the House bill would
transfer $100 million for the Global Fund for HIV/AIDS, Tuberculosis
and Malaria out of NIAID and into the Agency for International Development
(AID) budget; the remaining NIAID portfolio would actually increase
1.3 percent. The National
Center for Research Resources
(NCRR) budget would decline $15 million to $1.1 billion because of the
elimination of a $30 million program for extramural facilities construction,
leaving slightly increasing funding for NCRR’s
research programs. Buildings and Facilities funding would fall 26 percent
to $82 million as the renovation and construction of intramural biodefense facilities ramps down.
The largest increase would
go to the Office of the Director (OD) with a 35 percent boost to $482
million, but primarily because the House would transfer $97 million
from the Office of the HHS Secretary to NIH. The Office of the Secretary
requested $97 million (see Table 2) for
transfer to NIH to spend on developing medical countermeasures against
nuclear, radiological, and chemical terrorist attacks, nearly double
this year’s funding level because of the introduction of chemical countermeasures
to the 2006 program. The House would bypass the Office of the Secretary
and give the requested funds directly to NIH (see Table
1). But after excluding the transfer, the remaining increase for
OD would still be a substantial 7.6 percent to boost OD funding for
clinical research, high-risk basic research, and collaborative research
in the NIH Roadmap for Biomedical Research. The Roadmap would receive $333
million in FY 2006 (up 41 percent), with $83 million from OD and $250
million coming from other institutes’ budgets, with their contributions
going from 0.63 percent of institute budgets this year to 0.89 percent
in 2006.
Biodefense R&D continues to be a high priority in the NIH portfolio. NIH
identifies $1.7 billion for biodefense R&D
in FY 2006, essentially unchanged from this year. But a decline in biodefense laboratory construction funding would allow for
an 8 percent increase in biodefense R&D
grants and contracts to a total of $1.7 billion, plus another $97 million
in mostly biodefense funding transferred from the Office of the Secretary.
After providing $148 million this year to fund extramural construction
for biosafety level (BSL) 3 and 4 laboratories
around the nation, NIAID would ramp down to $30 million next year.
Figure 2. (click on the image for PDF)
NIH Funding Mechanisms
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. If the
request and House appropriation become final, NIH projects a decline in the number of Research Project Grants (RPGs) for the second
year in a row. RPG funding would increase by 0.4 percent in FY 2006 to
reach $14.9 billion, but these funds would support only 36,666 RPGs compared to roughly 37,000 this year and last year (see
Figure 2). Because RPGs are multi-year grants, the
number of new grants initiated in FY 2006 would be far smaller. In FY 2006, the
number of new grants would rise slightly to 9,463, but would remain well below
the 10,020 awarded last year.
NIH also projects a decline in the success rate for new grant applications
for the fifth year in a row to 21 percent next year, down steeply from
a high of 32 percent in FY 2001 (see Figure 2) because recent surges
in the number of applications have outpaced 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.
In the area of research policy, the House Appropriations
Committee defeated an amendment introduced by Rep. Weldon (R-FL) that
would have withheld all NIH funds from any institution involved in research
on stem cells derived from cloned embryos, even if the work is carried
out with private funds. The amendment could have cut off hundreds of
millions of dollars in all NIH funding from major research universities
around the country that would like to use state or private funds to
explore research cloning as an alternative to fertilized embryos as
a method of deriving stem cells. Although the amendment was defeated
36-29 in committee, it may be reintroduced during full House debate.
The House bill contains
language that follows up on a recent change in how NIH-funded research
is published. Last year’s House Labor-HHS appropriations report
contained language calling on NIH to outline a policy to allow public
access to all NIH-funded research results. Since then, NIH has implemented
a policy requesting all scientists who publish research papers resulting
from NIH-funded work to deposit the paper manuscript in the freely accessible
NIH PubMed Central database within a year of publication. The
current NIH policy is modified from an earlier draft which would have
required scientists to archive their work with PubMed
Central. The language accompanying this year’s House Labor-HHS bill
requests NIH to prepare a progress report on the policy, including estimates
of the number of peer-reviewed journal articles that have been deposited
with NIH vs. the total number published from NIH-funded work, and the
average delay between paper publication and public access through NIH.
R&D in Other HHS Agencies
Total R&D in the Department
of Health and Human Services (HHS) would be $29.1 billion in FY 2006,
a slight cut of 0.1 percent (see Table 2).
NIH dominates the HHS R&D portfolio, but excluding NIH the rest
of HHS would fund a still-substantial $1.1 billion in R&D in FY
2006 under the House plan, a cut of 13.2 percent. Most of the steep
cut would be due to the transfer of medical countermeasures R&D
from the Office of the Secretary to NIH, but in an extremely tight budget
environment all other HHS R&D agencies would face funding cuts.
Only the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) would retain
flat funding at $485 million for R&D in the House plan, and then
only because some anthrax vaccine research and biosurveillance
R&D funding would transfer from the Office of the Secretary (see
Table 2).
Next Steps
The full House is expected to debate
and approve the Labor-HHS bill later this week. The Senate Appropriations
Committee is expected to draft its version in early July.
-
June 21, 2005
(This analysis is one of a series of AAAS R&D Funding
Updates on FY 2006 congressional appropriations. The complete series
of AAAS R&D Funding Updates, including continually updated analyses
of R&D in FY 2006 appropriations, is available on the AAAS
R&D Web Site (http://www.aaas.org/spp/rd) in the "FY
2006 R&D" or the "What's New"
sections.)
AAAS R&D Budget and Policy Program
1200 New York Ave, NW
Washington, DC 20005
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Web site: www.aaas.org/spp/rd
