(This
analysis is a preview of the NIH / HHS chapter in the forthcoming AAAS Report
XXXIII: Research and Development FY 2009, a comprehensive look at the President's
budget for R&D in FY 2009. This analysis contains revised AAAS estimates of
NIH and HHS R&D, different from figures originally presented in the President's
budget. More tables and continually updated supplemental materials on R&D
in the FY 2009 budget can be found on the AAAS R&D Web site at http://www.aaas.org/spp/rd.)
Highlights
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The National Institutes of Health (NIH) would receive exactly the same budget
in 2009 as in 2008, a total of $29.5 billion (up 0.0 percent). Most of NIH’s institutes
and centers (IC’s) would see their budgets remain flat for the fifth year in a
row, with no allowance for inflation. NIH R&D would also remain flat at
$28.7 billion (up 0.0 percent; see Table II-9).
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In 2009, there would be fewer new research grants, the real size of the average
research grant would shrink for the fifth year in a row, and the success rate
for grant competitions could fall to a new low of 18 percent.
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After peaking in 2004, the NIH budget has declined every year in real terms, and
if enacted the 2009 request would leave NIH funding 8 percent below 2004 after
adjusting for economy-wide inflation and 13 percent below 2004 after adjusting
for NIH’s own calculations of biomedical research inflation.
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With the budget freeze, there would be few new initiatives. A rare growth area
would be the NIH Common Fund (NIH Roadmap) in the Office of the Director with
a $534 million request (up 8.8 percent; see Table II-10).
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R&D in the other Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) agencies combined
would rise 15.0 percent to $1.3 billion because of a $250 million request for
biomedical countermeasures R&D for the Biomedical Advanced Research Development
Authority (BARDA) in the Office of the Secretary, more than double the $102 million
2008 allocation (see Table II-8).
Overview of the FY 2009 NIH Budget
The
National Institutes of Health (NIH) 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 and related fields.
The FY 2009 NIH budget of $29.5 billion would
be exactly the same as the recently finalized 2008 budget (see Table
II-9). A year ago, the Bush Administration
requested $28.9 billion for 2008, but Congress added $600 million to the request
for a 1.1 percent increase over the previous year.
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 $28.7 billion next year,
nearly even with 2008 (down $10 million for a 0.0 percent cut). Recent budget
trends of cuts or flat funding represent a sharp turnaround after a completed
five-year doubling campaign involving 15 percent increases for each of the five
years between 1998 and 2003 (see Figure 1). Growth in the NIH budget slowed sharply
in 2004, and in inflation-adjusted terms NIH funding has declined since then.
The 2009 budget would continue the downward trend for the fifth year in a row
within a shrinking overall domestic budget.
Figure 1. (click on the image for
PDF)
NIH
funding would lag well behind inflation in the economy as a whole, projected at
2.0 percent next year (see Figure 1). The 2009 NIH budget would be 7.7 percent
below the 2004 peak after adjusting for inflation. But NIH would fall even further
behind in its 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 2009 to be 3.5 percent, the
same rate as 2008. In recent years, the BRDPI inflation rate has outpaced the
economy-wide inflation rate by close to 2 percentage points a year. Using BRDPI,
the 2009 budget would be 13 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 Institutes in the FY 2009 Budget
The
NIH budget is actually appropriated in 26 separate budget accounts, roughly corresponding
to NIH’s institutes and centers (IC’s; see Table II-9).
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 2009 budget, nearly all IC’s would see their budgets remain flat for the
fifth year in a row. Among the 20 independent institutes, none would see an
increase greater than 0.5 percent, and nearly all would receive only $1 or $2
million more than the current year. 16 of the 20 institutes would have less money
in 2009 than in 2005 even before inflation is factored in.
Among
NIH’s other accounts, only the National Center for Research Resources (NCRR) would
see any increase, and even then just a modest 1.0 percent to $1.2 billion (see
Table II-9). The NCRR would invest $452 million in
Clinical Research, up $12 million from 2008, with an emphasis on clinical and
translational science awards and general clinical research centers.
Trans-NIH
initiatives in the NIH Common Fund (or the NIH Roadmap for Medical Research),
now centralized in the Office of the Director (OD), would climb $38 million or
7.7 percent to $534 million to become one of the few growth areas in the 2009
budget. OD funding of R&D on nuclear, radiological, and chemical countermeasures
would be another, growing $19 million to $113 million. The overall OD budget would
fall $52 million or 4.7 percent to $1.1 billion because the increases above would
be more than offset by the proposed cancellation of the National Children’s Study,
which received $111 million from Congress in 2008.
Because
of stagnant and declining funding in recent budgets and the 2009 request, all
NIH IC’s, except the Office of the Director, have lost ground significantly in
inflation-adjusted terms (see Figure 1). The largest institute, the National Cancer
Institute (NCI), would see its budget remain at $4.8 billion in 2009, 11 percent
below the 2004 funding level in real terms. The National Heart, Lung, and Blood
Institute (NHLBI) would have $2.9 billion in 2009, an 11 percent inflation-adjusted
loss compared to 2004. The other NIH institutes would see similar losses. Even
NIAID, which received billions of dollars in additional funds in the aftermath
of the fall 2001 anthrax attacks to become the second-largest NIH institute, has
lost ground in more recent years with a $4.6 billion 2009 request, 7 percent below
its 2004 budget in real terms. (The losses would be even greater if calculated
with the biomedical research BRDPI inflation index.)
NIH Funding Mechanisms
The
majority of NIH’s budget is distributed to external performers through Research
Project Grants (RPG’s), which are investigator initiated, peer reviewed, and competitively
awarded throughout the NIH budget (see Figure 2). NIH projects a decline in the
number of RPG’s in 2008, from a high of 37,060 in 2004 down to a projected 36,516
next year (see Table II-10 and Figure 3). NIH expects
to offer just 9,757 new (competing) RPG’s in 2009, below the 10,000+ new grants
awarded in 2003 and 2004. (RPG’s last 3.8 years on average, and nearly all are
funded a year at a time in successive budgets.)
Figure 2. (click on the image for
PDF)
Total
funding for RPG’s would be $14.9 billion in 2009, down from both 2007 and 2008
(see Table II-10 and Figure 2). As shown in Figure 2, RPG funding has declined
steadily in real terms after peaking in 2004. Not only have RPG numbers declined,
but the average RPG continues to lose ground to inflation (see Figure 3). In the
2009 budget, NIH once again warns researchers that they are unlikely to see any
inflationary adjustments for the second or later years for their grants. In real
terms, the average RPG of $408,100 would be 9 percent smaller in 2009 than in
2004, and even smaller if adjusted for biomedical research inflation.
From
funding an average of 1 out of 3 grant applications earlier in the decade, NIH
now expects to fund fewer than 1 in 5 applications. NIH projects the success rate for new grant applications will fall to
18 percent in 2009, down steeply and steadily from a high of 32 percent in
FY 2001 (see Figure 3) because recent surges in the number of applications have
far outpaced the number of grants awarded. Although the number of RPG’s increased
from 25,000 in the early ‘90s to more than 35,000 (see Figure 3), 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.
Several NIH institutes would see success rates well below the 18 percent NIH-wide
average. The National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences (NEHS), most
recently at 22 percent in 2006, projects only a 11 percent success rate in its 2009 grant competitions, while
the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development (NICHD) expects only
a 14 percent success rate next year.
Figure 3. (click on the image for
PDF)
NIH
also distributes about 10 percent of its budget through R&D contracts (see
Table II-10 and Figure 2). Funding for
R&D contracts would continue to increase, by 1.0 percent to $3.3 billion in
FY 2009. NIH funding of research centers would also continue to grow modestly
in FY 2009, by 0.7 percent to $3.0 billion, for support of 1,417 centers. These
multi-year multidisciplinary commitments of funds, mostly to universities, have
grown in importance over the past decade and would hit an all-time high of 10.1
percent of the total NIH budget in FY 2009.
The
institutes also operate an enormous federal research enterprise, mostly in Bethesda,
MD. Intramural research would total $3.1 billion
in 2009, continuing the flat funding trends of recent years.
NIH is heavily involved in research training
of the next generation of biomedical researchers. Research training programs would
receive $786 million in FY 2009, up slightly from the
current year (see Table II-10). Tight budgets would keep NIH at approximately
17,600 full-time training positions. Stipends for predoctoral and postdoctoral
trainees would increase slightly, though at far less than expected inflation.
A
new program to encourage new investigators, launched last year, would expand in
FY 2009. Pathways to Independence,
started with $15 million last year and increasing to $71 million in 2009, would
provide up to 5 years of support for scientists just beginning their research
careers. These awards, which combine research and training support, are designed
to transition scientists from mentored research to independent research and would
go partway to alleviating the great difficulty that new investigators have in
winning their first full NIH grants. In FY 2009, some of the first cohort of these
investigators should graduate to being funded by RPG’s. Within OD, there would
also be $91 million (up slightly from $90 million) for the NIH Director’s Bridge
Award, which provides ‘bridge’ funding to investigators without other support
who may be between grants.
NIH Priority Areas
NIH
continues to expand funding for clinical research, high-risk basic research, new
research tools, and multidisciplinary collaborative research in the NIH Common Fund, also known as the Roadmap
for Biomedical Research. Total roadmap funding increased from $483 million
in 2007 to $496 million in 2008 and would increase a further $38 million or 7.7
percent to $534 million in 2009 (see Table II-10).
The Roadmap started out with funding from all of NIH’s IC’s, but since 2007 funding
has been centralized in the Office of the Director under the Common Fund.
Within
the Roadmap, funding for Research Teams of the Future would fall again, by $9
million down to $142 million because of cuts in interdisciplinary training. Funding
for the Director’s Pioneer Awards, which are five-year awards to individual investigators
to encourage high-risk basic research, would remain steady at $36 million. The
Director’s New Innovator Awards, similar to the Pathway to Independence
program in that it supports new investigators, would receive a flat $56 million
in 2009. The goal of Re-engineering the Clinical Research Enterprise, focused
on enhancing clinical research training and clinical research networks, would
decline $13 million to $103 million, mostly because total awards for Clinical
and Translational Science would fall from $90 million down to $83 million, although
similar funding in NCRR would increase. The New Pathways to Discovery theme would
increase 5.6 percent to $242 million for its diverse portfolio of programs, ranging
from funding of molecular libraries to nanomedicine to computational biology,
all centered on cutting-edge research to build biological databases and other
research tools that could benefit all biomedical research.
The big increases in 2009 would go genomics-related activities. There would
also be $47 million in new money for new Roadmap initiatives in new focus areas
that have yet to be finalized.
Biodefense R&D continues to be a priority
in the NIH portfolio, though its rapid growth days are over. NIH would
devote $1.7 billion for biodefense R&D in FY 2009, flat for the third year
in a row. The NIH biodefense effort also takes in work on chemical and radiological/nuclear
threats; in 2009, the latter portfolio would increase 20 percent to $113 million
with a focus on basic and applied research on new products for measuring and treating
radiation exposure.
HIV/AIDS
research continues to be another focus area in the budget. The HIV/AIDS R&D
portfolio would remain stable at $2.9 billion for the fifth year in a row in 2009.
The majority of this research would be funded by NIAID, the lead institute for
AIDS research. Included in the FY 2009 budget is $300 million 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, up $5 million
from 2008 but nearly triple the funding level for 2007 and earlier years.
Among
other research areas, an area small in funding but large in policy interest is
embryonic stem cell research. 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 stem cell lines eligible for federal funding has been vetoed
twice by President Bush. In the meantime, NIH reports that its funding of human
embryonic stem cell research using the pre-August 2001 approved stem cell lines
is $42 million this year. But total NIH-funded stem cell research has been growing
and could reach $656 million this year, mostly on non-human stem cells or on human
non-embryonic cells.
R&D in Other HHS Agencies
Total
R&D in the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) would be $29.9 billion
in FY 2009, a 0.5 percent increase (see Table II-8).
NIH dominates the HHS R&D portfolio, but the rest of HHS (excluding NIH) would
fund a still-substantial $1.3 billion in R&D in FY 2009, an increase of $157
million or 15 percent because of a substantial increase from $102 million to $250
million for biodefense countermeasures R&D funded by the relatively new Biomedical
Advanced Research Development Authority (BARDA) in the Office of the Secretary.
BARDA, which was officially created a little more than a year ago, works with
the more research-oriented biodefense efforts in NIH to develop countermeasures
against bioterror threats that could potentially be added to the Strategic National
Stockpile for mass distribution in the event of a terrorist attack.
Outlook for the NIH Budget
As
physical sciences research continues to be a focus in the 2009 budget through
the American Competitiveness Initiative, biomedical research continues to be in
the same boat as other domestic programs in tight budgetary conditions. Five years
of falling budgets are a sharp contrast from the 15 percent annual increases during
the NIH doubling period of 1998 to 2003. As the 2009 budget goes to Congress,
the biomedical research community can take some comfort in the fact that the 110th
Congress has given unexpected $600 million boosts to NIH for two appropriations
seasons in a row when wrapping up 2007 and 2008 appropriations. But in an overall
domestic budget that is tightly constrained, Congress has been unable to offer
more when faced with President Bush’s resistance to higher domestic spending and
his budget requests for HHS that routinely propose eliminations or deep cuts in
other health care programs. Although Congress will try again to add billions in
domestic spending to the 2009 appropriations bills, the President has promised
to veto bills if they exceed his request, so unless Congress is more successful
than the past two years in getting President Bush to accept more spending or unless
Congress waits until January 2009 for a new president who may be more amenable
to higher appropriations, NIH may once again find its budget falling further and
further behind the increasing challenges and costs of biomedical research.
(More
materials on R&D in the FY 2009 budget, historical data and charts, and more
information on AAAS Report XXXIII: Research and Development FY 2009, can
be found on the AAAS R&D Web site at http://www.aaas.org/spp/rd.)
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February 19, 2008
AAAS R&D Budget and Policy Program
1200 New York Avenue,
NW
Washington, DC 20005
(202) 326-6607
AAAS R&D Web site: http://www.aaas.org/spp/rd
