Highlights-
The Senate would add $1.0 billion to the 2009 request for the National Institutes
of Health (NIH) budget for a total of $30.5 billion, an increase of 3.0 percent
over the current year (see Table 1). [In contrast
to a request that would keep NIH institute funding flat, most of NIH’s institutes
and centers (IC’s) would see their budgets increase by 2 to 2.5 percent in the
Senate plan.] NIH R&D would total $29.7 billion, also $1.0 billion more
than the request (up 2.9 percent; see Table 1).
-
The Senate plan would reverse the trend of the NIH budget declining in real
terms for four years in a row, and would allow NIH funding to stay ahead of economy-wide
inflation for the first time since 2004. The Senate plan would allow the NIH
budget to just match the 3.5 percent projected rate for biomedical research inflation
if the recently enacted 2008 supplemental is excluded.
-
[Funding for the NIH Common Fund (NIH Roadmap) in the Office of the Director would
be the largest growth area with a 14.0 percent increase to $568 million in the
Senate appropriation] (see Table 1).
-
R&D in the other Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) agencies would
also increase, primarily because of a $175 million appropriation for biomedical
countermeasures R&D for the Biomedical Advanced Research Development Authority
(BARDA) in the Office of the Secretary, nearly double the $102 million 2008 allocation
though short of the $275 million request
(see Table 2).
NIH R&D in FY 2009 Senate Appropriations
[On June 26, the Senate
Appropriations Committee approved its version of the FY 2009 Labor-HHS appropriations
bill (S 3230) providing funding for the Departments of Labor, Health and Human
Services (HHS), and Education, but as of August the full Senate has not scheduled
floor time for the bill.] The Senate would spend $7 billion more on these programs
in 2009 than the President’s request for a total of $153 billion in discretionary
funding. The National Institutes of Health (NIH) within HHS would get $1 billion
of the additional Senate dollars. 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 Senate would add $1.0 billion to the 2009
request to bring NIH’s total budget to $30.5 billion, an increase of $875 million
or 3.0 percent over the current year (see Table 1).
(Originally, the NIH 2009 request was exactly
equal to the 2008 budget, but on June 30 NIH received an extra $150 million in
2008 funding as part of a war-related supplemental appropriations bill. All figures
include the $150 million in the 2008 total. Without the supplemental, the Senate
appropriation would be a $1.0 billion or 3.5 percent increase over 2008.) The
Senate’s action could allow NIH funding to stay ahead of economy-wide inflation
for the first time since 2004, and reflects Senate appropriators’ concerns that
NIH funding has declined significantly over the last several years, reducing researchers’
chances of getting an NIH grant application approved to 1 in 5 and increasing
the average age when investigators receive their first standard research grant
to 42.
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 $29.7 billion next year
in the Senate plan, an increase of $838 million or 2.9 percent over the current
year (including the recent supplemental). 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 request would continue
the downward trend for the fifth year in a row within a shrinking overall domestic
budget, but the Senate, working from a budget blueprint allowing the domestic
budget to keep pace with inflation, would try to reverse recent trends with an
increase ahead of the 2.0 percent projected inflation rate for 2009.
Figure 1. (click on the image for
PDF)
The
Senate plan would bring the 2009 NIH budget to 4.5 percent below the 2004 peak
after adjusting for inflation, an improvement over the current year. The Senate
plan would almost match 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 2009 to be
3.5 percent, the same rate as 2008. The Senate appropriation’s 3.0 percent increase
is a 3.5 percent increase if the recently enacted 2008 supplemental of $150 million
is excluded, so the increase would match the BRDPI inflation rate; if the Senate
plan prevails, NIH funding would keep pace with biomedical research inflation
for the first time since 2003. Using BRDPI, the 2009 Senate appropriation would
be 10 percent less than the 2004 budget. (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 Senate 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 2009 Senate appropriation, nearly all IC’s would see their budgets increase
by 2 to 2.5 percent, instead of flat funding in the request. Among the 20
independent institutes, all would see an increase of at least 2.1 percent, and
would allow most IC’s stay ahead of economy-wide inflation for the first time
since 2004. The National Cancer Institute, the largest institute, would approach
its first $5 billion budget with a $5.0 billion appropriation, up $128 million
or 2.6 percent for its first real (inflation-adjusted) increase since 2004.]
The
largest increase would go to the Buildings and Facilities account with $147 million,
up 23.2 percent over the current year. [The largest dollar increase would go to
the Office of the Director, up $164 million or 14.7 percent to $1.3 billion instead
of a requested cut, to boost funding for two key programs. 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 $70 million or 14.0 percent to
$568 million, well above the requested increase.] The Senate would also reverse
the proposed cancellation of the National Children’s Study with a $192 million
appropriation compared to a zero request, up from $111 million from Congress in
2008. The Senate would also go along with OD request to increase funding of R&D
on nuclear, radiological, and chemical countermeasures by $19 million to $113
million.
[The
Senate would also award a larger-than-average increase to the National
Center for Research Resources (NCRR)
with a $1.2 billion appropriation, 3.2 percent or $37 million more than this year.]
Part of the larger increase would be from the shift of some Clinical and Translational
Science Awards (CTSA) funding from the Office of the Director to NCRR. Total CTSA
funding would be $475 million in the Senate plan, nearly all of it from NCRR,
compared to $472 million for the total program in 2008. The Senate also funds
the Institutional Development Awards (IDeA) program within NCRR at $226 million,
up from $218 million in 2008 and the 2009 request; the IDeA program aims to improve
research competitiveness for states that have traditionally been underrepresented
in winning NIH funds through programs to strengthen biomedical research capacity
and capabilities.
Figure 2. (click on the image for
PDF)
Because
of stagnant and declining funding in recent budgets, all NIH IC’s, except the
Office of the Director, have lost ground significantly in inflation-adjusted terms
(see Figure 2) but the Senate appropriation could represent a slight turnaround
in their fortunes. The National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute (NHLBI) would
have $3.0 billion in 2009 under the Senate plan for the first real increase since
2004. [The National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (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, would receive
$4.7 billion from the Senate, a gain of 2.3 percent.]
NIH Funding Mechanisms and Priority Areas
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. NIH projects a decline in the number of RPG’s,
from a high of 37,060 in 2004 down to a projected 36,516 next year. NIH expects
to offer just 9,757 new (competing) RPG’s in 2009 based on its request, 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.) But the Senate
appropriation could allow NIH to make 10,471 new RPG’s in 2009, which would be
the most ever. The additional Senate-funded RPG’s would most likely allow the
success rate of new grant applications to be significantly higher than the 18
percent rate NIH is currently projecting for 2009.
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 $498 million in 2008 and would increase a further $70 million or 14.0
percent to $568 million in the 2009 Senate plan (see Table 1), well above the
$534 million request. 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 the Director’s Pioneer Awards, which are five-year awards
to individual investigators to encourage high-risk basic research, would increase
$9 million in the Senate plan to $45 million. The Director’s New Innovator Awards,
similar to the Pathway to Independence
program in that it supports new investigators, would receive $108 million in the
Senate appropriation, nearly double the $56 million 2008 allocation and 2009 request.
And the Senate would provide $50 million for a new program in Transformative Research
Project Grants to fund ‘transformative’ investigator-initiated proposals.
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 the
2009 request but could top $3 billion if the Senate appropriation is enacted.
The majority of this research would be funded by NIAID, the lead institute for
AIDS research. Included in the FY 2009 budget and the Senate appropriation 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. The Senate bill is silent on the stem cell policy question.
The
Senate bill contains a provision that affirms a policy requiring NIH-funded researchers
to make their research papers freely accessible. Since a similar provision
was included in the final 2008 NIH appropriation, NIH-funded researchers have
had 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 calls on NIH to make PubMed
Central a central, open-access repository for all NIH-funded research findings.
Although
the Senate Labor-HHS bill does not contain any binding legal language on the issue,
the report accompanying the bill urges the NIH Director to continue efforts to
strengthen conflicts of interest and financial disclosure guidelines for NIH employees
and NIH-funded researchers.
R&D in Other HHS Agencies
Total
R&D in the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) would be $30.9 billion
in the FY 2009 Senate Labor-HHS bill, a 3.0 percent increase (see Table
2). NIH dominates the HHS R&D portfolio, but the rest of HHS (excluding
NIH) would fund a still-substantial $1.2 billion in R&D in FY 2009, an increase
of $69 million or 6.1 percent because of a substantial increase from $102 million
to $175 million for biodefense countermeasures R&D funded by the relatively
new Biomedical Advanced Research Development Authority (BARDA) in the Office of
the Secretary. The request was for $275 million. 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 and Next Steps
[The
full Senate could debate and approve the Labor-HHS bill in September, but it is
increasingly likely not to debate it at all before the November elections.] The
House Appropriations Committee has marked up a counterpart version with a similar
$1 billion in additional funding for NIH, but has not released the draft yet because
of the House’s doubts as to whether the bill will receive floor time and debate.
There is now almost no chance
that Congress will send a final version of the bill to President Bush before the
October 1 start of FY 2009. The President has threatened to veto any 2009
appropriations bill that exceeds his request; since both the House and Senate
versions of the bill do so and since Congress is not inclined to do the heavy
lifting of negotiating a House-Senate compromise bill only to see it vetoed, the
bill may have a long way to go before its funding levels become final. The promised
Senate increase for NIH in 2009, if it happens at all, could be delayed until
next January.
(This
analysis is one of a series of AAAS R&D Funding Updates on FY 2009 congressional
appropriations. The complete series of AAAS R&D Funding Updates, including
continually updated analyses of R&D in FY 2009 appropriations, is available
on the AAAS R&D web site (http://www.aaas.org/spp/rd)
in the "FY 2009 R&D" or the "What's
New" sections.)
- July 14, 2008 (updated August 20)
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
