Highlights
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The House would give the National Institutes of Health (NIH) a total budget
of $29.9 billion in 2008, an increase of $701 million or 2.4 percent over the
current year. While this would be $1.0 billion more than NIH’s request, it would
fall $249 million short of a 3.3 percent Senate increase (see Table
1).
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Because much of the increase would go to a larger transfer to the Global Fund
for HIV/AIDS and increased funding for the NIH Common Fund, most NIH institutes
and centers (IC’s) would see their budgets increase between 1.5 and 1.7 percent
in the House, well short of expected economy-wide inflation.
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NIH R&D spending, 97 percent of the total NIH budget except for some training
and overhead costs, would increase 2.4 percent or $668
million to $29.1 billion in the House.
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The Office of the Director (OD) budget would climb to $1.1 billion in
2008 in both the House and Senate to centralize NIH Common Fund (Roadmap) dollars.
The Common Fund would total $495 million in the House appropriation, up 2.5 percent
over the current year.
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Because an unusually large number of existing
research grants would end, NIH expects to offer more than 10,000 new research
grants in 2008 for the first time since 2004, and both the House and Senate plans
would allow NIH to give inflationary adjustments for existing grants and new grants.
- Both the House and the Senate would require
NIH grantees to make their published research papers freely accessible within
a year of publication.
- Total Department of Health and Human
Services (HHS) R&D would be $30.5 billion in the House plan, an increase of
$802 million or 2.7 percent (see Table 2). Although
NIH dominates the HHS portfolio, there would be increases for most other HHS agencies,
including a 74 percent increase in the Office of the Secretary to $192 million,
primarily for R&D on biodefense countermeasures.
NIH R&D in FY 2008 House Appropriations
On
July 11, the House Appropriations Committee approved its version of the FY 2008
Labor-HHS appropriations bill (HR 3043) providing funding for the Departments
of Labor, Health and Human Services, and Education, for consideration by the full
House later this week. The Senate Appropriations Committee approved its own version
in June (S 1710).
The
National Institutes of Health (NIH), the largest R&D funding agency supported
by the Labor-HHS bill, is the second-largest supporter of R&D in the federal
government, after the Department of Defense. In its mission to promote biomedical
research and other fundamental inquiries that may lead to medical advances, it
is by far the largest federal supporter of basic research, applied research, and
R&D at colleges and universities, and has a disproportionate impact on support
for the biomedical life sciences.
The House FY 2008 NIH appropriation of $29.9
billion would fall short of the more generous Senate appropriation, but would
be $701 million or 2.4 percent more than the current budget,
and $1.0 billion more than a requested cut (See Table 1). The $701 million House increase becomes a $501
million increase after adjusting for an extra $200 million to the Global
Fund for HIV/AIDS on top of the usual $100 million, money that would be transferred
out of NIH. The Senate would give NIH $30.1 billion, a 3.3 percent increase. (For
details of the NIH request, see the February 22 AAAS R&D
Funding Update or Chapter 7 of AAAS
Report XXXII: R&D FY 2008. Details of Senate appropriations for NIH
are available in the July 2 AAAS R&D Funding Update.)
Figure 1. (click on the image for
PDF)
The House plan would just match
the expected rate of inflation in the economy as a whole, projected at 2.4 percent
next year. But the impact of past budget cuts would leave NIH 4.5 percent below
the 2004 peak in real terms. But because of the Global Fund transfer and a large
increase for trans-NIH initiatives in the Office of the Director, most NIH
institutes and centers (IC’s) would see smaller increases of between 2.3 and 2.5
percent in the Senate plan and between 1.5 and 1.7 percent in the House bill
(see Table 1). Thus, the House plan would mean another
year of decline in real terms for most IC’s (see Figure 1). All of these budget
plans fall well short of the 6.7 percent increase advocated by many supporters
of biomedical research and also well short of the $32.8 billion (a 12 percent
increase) authorized in the NIH authorization bill enacted at the end of 2006.
Even
the Senate increase, and certainly the House increase, would lag behind NIH’s
own calculations of biomedical research inflation. NIH calculates a 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 2008 to be 3.7 percent, the same rate
as 2007. Using BRDPI, the 2008 NIH House appropriation would be 8.8 percent less
than the 2004 budget in biomedical inflation-adjusted terms. (AAAS and the federal
government generally use the economy-wide GDP deflator to adjust R&D dollars
for inflation.)
NIH
classifies 97 percent of its budget as R&D, including R&D facilities.
(The remainder is for overhead costs and research training.) NIH R&D would total $29.1 billion in the
House plan, a 2.4 percent increase.
NIH Institutes in the FY 2008 House Appropriation
The
NIH budget is actually appropriated in 26 separate budget accounts, roughly corresponding
to NIH’s institutes and centers (IC’s; see Table 1). There are 20 institutes with
separate budgets, along with four centers, an Office of the Director (OD), and
a Buildings and Facilities account. There are three other centers that are not
separately budgeted.
In
the FY 2008 House appropriation, nearly all IC’s would see their budgets increase
between 1.5 and 1.7 percent, well short of economy-wide inflation but better than
the cuts of recent years (see Figure 1). Among the 20 independent institutes,
only the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID) would receive
a significant increase of $249 million (up 5.7 percent) to $4.6 billion, but almost
entirely because of an extra $200 million contribution to the Global Fund for
HIV/AIDS. Among the 19 other institutes, only the National
Center for Research and Resources (NCRR)
would see an increase greater than 3 percent, a 3.4 percent increase to $1.2 billion.
In
the House bill, the Office of the Director (OD) sees its budget increase 1.7 percent
or $19 million to $1.1 billion. The amount is more than double the request because
Congress would allocate all funding for the trans-NIH Common Fund within OD. The
2008 House OD budget appropriation includes, in addition to $495 million for the
Common Fund (up 2.5 percent), $111 million for the second full year of the National
Children’s Study (transferred last year from the National Institute of Child Health
and Development (NICHD)). The House would also allocate $92 million for one-year
Bridge awards for new investigators facing their first award renewal, and $31
million for the Pathways to Independence program to provide new investigators
with mentored grants that transition to independent research grants. The additional
Common Fund dollars include $27 million for Director’s Pioneer Awards (up from
the $24 million request) to allow competitively selected researchers a five-year
award to perform high-risk, highly innovative research.
Because
of stagnant and declining funding in recent budgets and the 2008 request, all
NIH IC’s, except the Office of the Director, have lost ground significantly in
inflation-adjusted terms (see Figure 1). (The losses would be even greater if
calculated with the biomedical research BRDPI inflation index.)
NIH Priority Areas and Policy Changes
NIH
continues to expand funding for clinical research, high-risk basic research, new
research tools, and multidisciplinary collaborative research in the NIH Roadmap for Biomedical Research, renamed
the NIH Common Fund in last year’s NIH authorization bill.
The Common Fund, after increasing from $240 million to $329 million in 2006, increased
to $483 million in 2007, and would increase even more by 10 percent in the Senate
plan to $531 million and by 2.5 percent in the House to $495 million (see Table
1). Common Fund money started out distributed among all the IC’s, but in 2007
Congress chose to appropriate all Common Fund money in the Office of the Director
(OD). NIH’s 2008 budget request proposed to have each IC contribute 1.3 percent
of its budget, with OD kicking in $122 million, but both the House and the Senate
would continue the 2007 practice of having all funding come from the Office of
the Director.
Since
President Bush’s announcement in August 2001 that NIH would fund human embryonic
stem cell research only on stem cell lines that were created before that date
and approved by NIH, there has been ongoing controversy over how the policy might
limit progress on stem cell research. A bill to greatly expand the number of stem
cell lines eligible for federal funding was vetoed by President Bush last summer,
and a nearly identical bill was vetoed again in June. The Senate bill would greatly
ease restrictions on stem cell research, but the House bill would keep the current
policy in place.
Both
the House and the Senate would require NIH-funded researchers to make their research
papers freely accessible. Both bills would require NIH-funded researchers
to submit electronic versions of their final published research papers to NIH
as soon as possible but no later than 12 months after publication, so that NIH-funded
research results can be freely accessible to the public in NIH’s PubMed Central
digital archive. The legally binding language follows non-binding report language
in previous appropriations bills calling on NIH to make PubMed Central a central,
open-access repository for all NIH-funded research findings. Currently, such submissions
are voluntary, and Congress has been frustrated by the low percentages of researchers
who have submitted their papers.
R&D
in Other HHS Agencies
Total R&D in the Department of Health and
Human Services (HHS) would be $30.5 billion in the FY 2008 House plan, a 2.7 percent
increase instead of a requested cut (see Table 2).
NIH dominates the HHS R&D portfolio, but the rest of HHS (excluding NIH) would
fund a still-substantial $1.4 billion in R&D in FY 2008, an increase of 10.6
percent. The majority of the non-NIH increase would go to the Office of the Secretary,
which would see its R&D funding nearly double from $110 million to $192 million
in the House plan, falling short of even greater increases in the request and
in the Senate. As part of its expanding effort to fund anthrax research and other
R&D related to defenses against terrorist threats, the Office of the Secretary
plans to fund biodefense R&D in the newly created Biodefense Advanced Research
and Development Authority (BARDA) in FY 2008. BARDA will fund advanced research
and development of new biodefense countermeasures as part of an HHS-wide effort
to secure an adequate supply of such countermeasures for the Strategic National
Stockpile. There would also be a boost in R&D in the Health Resources and
Services Administration (HRSA) in the House to $16 million, primarily because
of the return of earmarked biomedical research facilities in 2008 after a two-year
moratorium on earmarked projects. The Senate would add even more earmarks for
a $33 million HRSA R&D total.
Outlook
and Next Steps
The
Senate and the House are expected to debate their respective versions of the Labor-HHS
bill later this month. Congress will try to send a final version of the bill to
President Bush before the October 1 start of FY 2008. The President has threatened
to veto any 2008 appropriations bill that exceeds his request, as both the House
and Senate bills do by several billions of dollars, so the bill may have a long
way to go before its funding levels become final.
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July 16, 2007
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