Highlights
- The Senate would give
$29.6 billion to the National Institutes of Health (NIH) next year,
a $1.0 billion increase (see Table 1). In
contrast to the House and the budget request’s 0.5 percent increase,
the Senate appropriation would be a 3.7 percent boost, ahead of expected
biomedical research inflation.
- Most NIH institutes would receive increases of between 2.8 and 3.8 percent
in the Senate plan.
- The largest
percentage increase would go to the Office of the Director (OD; up 36.1
percent to $487 million) for a transfer of homeland security R&D
funds totaling $97 million from the Office of the HHS Secretary, but
also for increases in 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 4.1 percent to $28.6
billion in the Senate plan.
- R&D in
the other Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) agencies combined
would fall 10.9 percent to $1.2 billion (see Table
2). Most of the overall cut, however, would be due to the transfer
of homeland security R&D from the Office of the Secretary to NIH.
NIH R&D in FY 2006 Senate Appropriations
On July 14, the
Senate Appropriations Committee approved its version of the FY 2006
Labor-HHS-Education appropriations bill (HR 3010), following House approval
of its own version in June. The Senate bill may be debated and approved
by the full Senate later this month. Despite the same tight restraints
on domestic spending agreed to by Congress and the President earlier
this year, the Committee managed to add nearly $4 billion to the request
for programs covered by the bill by shifting a program payday from FY
2006 to FY 2007 and other accounting maneuvers. The bill is nearly $3
billion above the House version. A large chunk of the additional funds
would go to NIH: the Senate Labor-HHS bill would provide $29.6 billion
for the NIH budget in FY 2006, $905 million more than the request and
$1.0 billion more than FY 2005 (see Table
1). The 3.7 percent Senate-proposed increase compares to a 0.5 percent
House and requested increase.
NIH classifies
97 percent of its budget as R&D, including R&D facilities (the
remainder is for overhead costs and research training). The Senate
plan would provide $28.8 billion for NIH R&D, also a 3.7 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. For details of House appropriations
for NIH, see the June 21 R&D Funding Update).
NIH support of basic and applied research would grow slightly faster
than total R&D with a 4.1 percent increase to $28.6 billion 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, marking 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.)
The Senate bill
harshly criticizes NIH for falling behind the biomedical inflation index
in new grants awards next year. The Senate increase should allow NIH
to increase the average new grant by the 3.2 percent BRDPI increase
next year and would keep the overall NIH budget just ahead of economy-wide
inflation (see Figure 1).
Figure 1. (click on the image for PDF)
Most NIH institutes would receive increases in a range between 2.8 and
3.8 percent in the Senate plan. The National
Center for Research Resources
(NCRR) budget would increase 6.5 percent to $1.2 billion in contrast to a
requested cut. The Senate would provide $30 million to continue an extramural
facilities construction program that the House and NIH would eliminate.
The largest
increase would go to the Office of the Director (OD) with a 36.1 percent
boost to $487 million, but primarily because the Senate 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. Both the House and now the Senate
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 9 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) in the
request, 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.
In research policy,
the Senate 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. Language accompanying
both the House and Senate Labor-HHS bills request 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, the average delay
between paper publication and public access through NIH, and an estimate
for how much this policy is costing the National Library of Medicine
(NLM).
Although the Senate would not make any changes
to current policy, language accompanying the bill criticizes the
current Bush Administration policy on federal funding for human embryonic
stem cell (HES) research. The language strongly urges the Administration
to modify the current policy to allow for an expansion of federal funding,
and criticizes NIH’s implementation of the
current policy for leading to only $24 million in NIH funding this year
for HES research. The Senate is expected to vote on separate bills later
this month that would modify the current policy; among the bills is
one that would match a House-approved bill to expand federal funding
for embryonic stem cell research beyond the currently approved lines
to lines derived after the August 2001 cut-off date of the current policy.
R&D in Other HHS Agencies
Total R&D
in the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) would be $30.0
billion in FY 2006, a gain of 3.0 percent (see Table
2). NIH dominates the HHS R&D portfolio, but excluding NIH the
rest of HHS would fund a still-substantial $1.2 billion in R&D in
FY 2006 under the Senate plan, a cut of 10.9 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 flat funding or
cuts.
Next Steps
The Senate hopes
to debate and approve the Labor-HHS bill this month, but a logjam of
other appropriations bills and other legislation may push back Senate
consideration until September. Although the Senate’s accounting maneuvers
allow the NIH to receive a healthy increase, the House has taken a dim
view of such maneuvers in the past. If House opposition prevails in
conference as expected, then the additional billions in the Labor-HHS
bill could disappear in conference and the NIH appropriation could end
up at the House-approved flat funding level instead of the Senate increase.
-
July 15, 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
(202) 326-6607; -6600
AAAS R&D
Web site: www.aaas.org/spp/rd
