Overall, federal science fares well in President Barack Obama's recently announced FY2010
budget, but the National Institutes of Health would net a pretty paltry increase under the president's plan. In the proposal, the NIH stands to get slightly more than $30.8 billion in 2010. This would represent a $443 million, or 1.5%, bump over the NIH's 2009 budget.
Kathleen Sebelius, our newly crowned Department of Health and Human Services Secretary, delivered the news at a press conference today.
When asked by a reporter with
Nature how that rather slim funding increase would play out when measured against the $10.4 billion the NIH got in the stimulus package, Sebelius said that the issue would become important...later.
"It's clear that we need to start foreshadowing what's going to happen in FY2011," Sebelius said. The NIH must spend all that stimulus cash in two years, and has just received its first avalanche of grant applications in hopes of getting $200 million in "Challenge Grant" money out the door by the end of FY2010. "We certainly need to begin working on what happens in 2011 and 2012," Sebelius, flanked by several directors and acting directors of HHS agencies, added.
Other science agencies make out a little better than the NIH in Obama's 2010 budget proposal. The Food and Drug Administration would get $511 million, its largest increase ever, under the president's plan. The Centers for Disease Control would get about $6.4 billion in 2010. The
Department of Energy's Office of Science would get about $1.6 billion. And the
National Science Foundation would get a whopping 16% increase with a $7 billion 2010 budget. The $3.6 trillion budget now moves on to Congress, where legislators will debate its finer points, make revisions, and return it to the president.
Correction (May 12): The figure given for CDC's proposed 2010 budget in the original version of this story was incorrect. The figure has been changed to reflect correct amount indicated in the president's budget. The Scientist
regrets the error.
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