Congress Begins Shaping A Research Bonanza

Question of the day: Why is basic research, particularly biomedical research, like highways and bridges? Answer: Because Congress loves them both, especially in this election year. 'MIRACULOUS': NIH, under the direction of Harold Varmus, would get an 8.4 percent increase in its budget under President Clinton's proposed plan. For that reason, as much as any other, the spending plan that Congress is now writing for the fiscal year that begins October 1 shapes up as one of the best research-funding budgets in decades, and possibly the best ever. President Bill Clinton set the tone last month, when he sent Congress a fiscal year (FY) 1999 budget that proposed a $2 billion increase, or 3 percent, in overall federal R&D spending. Clinton plans 8 percent jumps for both defense and civilian basic research, a 6 percent increase for civilian R&D, and a 0.3 percent trim in defense R&D that would raise the civilian share of federal R&D spending to 48 percent, compared with 47 percent this year. University-based research would increase by 6 percent, to $14.5 billion. Inflation is expected to be a relatively calm 2.2 percent as measured by the Consumer Price Index. "For those of us who came to Washington four years ago, amidst doubts that the federal budget could ever be balanced and amidst warnings that funding for science would soon decline, these events seem miraculous," National Institutes of Health director Harold Varmus said in a speech at the annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) in Philadelphia on February 13. Varmus's NIH was the biggest winner, in terms of dollars, in Clinton's spending blueprint-an increase of $1.2 billion, or 8.4 percent, to $14.8 billion (see table on page 4). That is well above the anticipated biomedical research inflation rate of 2.5 percent, and Congress will probably ratchet it up even more. Rep. John Edward Porter (R-Ill.) and Sen. Arlen Specter (R-Pa.) are both shooting for increases of about $2 billion, or 15 percent, with the goal of doubling NIH's budget in five years. Porter and Specter chair, respectively, the House and Senate Appropriations Subcommittees on Labor, Health and Human Services, and Education, the panels that write NIH's budget. Almost every other civilian research funding agency also would log significant boosts in Clinton's plan. National Science Foundation funding would grow 10 percent, to nearly $3.8 billion, and NSF's research-project support would climb 12 percent, to $2.1 billion. The Department of Energy's science program would expand 5 percent, to $2.4 billion. The National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) budget would shrink 1.3 percent, to $13.5 billion, but NASA's funding of life and microgravity science would jump nearly 13 percent, to $242 million. Republican critics were quick to point out that one of Clinton's key budget assumptions is, at best, wispy. The president counts on collecting nearly $10 billion in FY1999, and more than $65 billion over five years, from the proposed settlement of state lawsuits against the tobacco industry. But congressional approval of legislation to cement the deal-including protection for tobacco companies against class-action lawsuits-is a long shot this year. "By spending money that may not exist," warns House Science Committee Chairman F. James Sensenbrenner, Jr. (R-Wis.), "the president is putting funding for his new focus on science in jeopardy." There are mirrors as well as smoke in the Clinton plan. The president and other officials are ballyhooing his "Research Fund for America" as promising firm and growing funding for research over the next five years. But the details of the budget make clear that the "Research Fund" is simply packaging-a nice label for separate line items. Beyond the label, the administration is proposing no structural changes in the programs involved. The only element that ties them together is the idea that tobacco money may provide "offsetting revenues" to help pay the cost. Health and Human Services (HHS) Secretary Donna Shalala and other administration officials say that if the tobacco money is blown away, they will cut here to preserve research and other Clinton priorities. But they may not have to, because a second key assumption in Clinton's budget may work out better. After 30 years of federal deficits, Clinton projects a surplus of $9.9 billion in FY1999-and that projection may be highly conservative. As early as next month, some research-funding lobbyists predict, revised economic estimates will point to a growing surplus of anywhere from $15 billion to $30 billion because of continuing strong economic growth. UNKNOWN FACTORS: Rep. John Porter (R-Ill.) says that how a surplus would be used "depends on the economy's growth and the amount of revenues that are achieved." "We are basically three years ahead of schedule in bringing the budget into balance," Porter notes. "It looks better and better because the economy's been so strong." A growing surplus not only could cover the loss of tobacco money but also might persuade the House and Senate Budget Committees to lift the spending caps imposed by last year's balanced-budget law-if not this spring then in late summer, when appropriations bills will be coming to the House and Senate floors. The budget panels already are being urged by both Republican and Democratic lawmakers to adjust the caps to the hoped-for new reality. "They're being pressured about infrastructure, they're being pressured about tax cuts, they're being pressured about paying off the debt, and now they're being pressured by the president about Social Security," says Porter. But Capitol Hill veteran Michael Stephens of Van Scoyoc Associates in Washington, D.C., former staff director of the House Labor-HHS Appropriations Subcommittee, figures that "transportation and biomedical research are the only things that are on everybody's universal short list." Stephens, whose clients include the Federation of American Societies for Experimental Biology (FASEB), suggests that if the economic numbers improve, Congress will find it "irresistible" to cut taxes a bit, pay down the deficit a bit, and spend a bit on research and roads. Without putting it quite in those words, Porter sizes up the situation the same way. "I guess the bottom line is that it depends on the economy's growth and the amount of revenues that are achieved in the next six months or so," he says. SMOKE SCREEN? House Science Committee chairman James Sensebrenner (R-Wis.) asserts that by factoring in a tobacco settlement, Clinton is "spending money that may not exist." If prospects for federal research funding overall look better and better, they look best of all for biomedical research. Under Porter's and Specter's protection, NIH already has enjoyed three years of significant budget boosts in an era when most federal agencies have been squeezed. During that period, NIH devoted the biggest share of its increases to investigator-initiated grants, known as R01s, to researchers at academic and other nonprofit institutions. Now, NIH is eyeing some new sorts of investments. Among these are a 25 percent increase in the stipends for pre- and postdoctoral trainees receiving National Research Service Award fellowships; expanded funding for clinical trials; new support for purchasing super-expensive laboratory equipment, perhaps in shared-resource centers; additional help for investigators whose research is constrained by the high cost of equipment and animal models of disease; and possibly some laboratory-renovation money for universities. "I also think it's time that we invested more in instrumentation development, because I do think that what we do is limited by instrumentation," Varmus says. The budget for the National Center for Research Resources, which funds shared-resource centers and other infrastructure projects, would jump 13.4 percent, to nearly $515 million in FY1999, the biggest single percentage increase among NIH's institutes and centers. Construction of NIH's new Clinical Center will stay on track with $90 million budgeted in FY1999, the same amount as in this year's budget. That doesn't mean R01s are slighted in NIH's new budget plan. "We're still funding fewer [R01s] than we should be, in my view," Varmus says. "We're still making distinctions that are very arbitrary and denying funding to people whose grant applications are no worse than the applications that get funded." To ease that situation, NIH will devote 57 percent of its budget to research project grants, three quarters of which are R01s. It plans to fund 8,267 new grants and competing renewals in FY1999, compared with 7,625 this year, bringing the total of active research project grants to 28,603. To help cover today's high cost of doing research, the size of the new grants will be increased by an average of 10 percent, and researchers in the follow-on years of multiyear grants will get an average 3 percent boost. NIH's intramural research program will be funded at $1.5 billion, about 10 percent of the overall NIH budget. Scrapping the R29 FIRST award for first-time grant recipients will raise the cost of the individual-investigator grant portfolio because NIH promises to award at least as many grants to new investigators as the R29 program provided-and R01s provide more than twice as much funding. The R29 "always seemed to me a penalty in some sense, because it told new investigators that they should be productive over five years with a paltry stipend," Varmus says. All told, NIH expects a success rate (the percentage of applications that eventually get funded) of about 33 percent compared with about 30 percent this year-and possibly higher if Porter and Specter manage to increase the agency's budget by more than the 8.4 percent that the administration proposes. But Varmus has grown increasingly skeptical of the success-rate calculation, and he has told individual institutes to break out precisely what the number means. "If you aggregate the success rates," he says, "you can get fooled into thinking that things are fine, when in fact a small but very significant component of the applicant community is not well served." Of course, there's nothing new about questioning the meaning of success rates. Extramural scientists have been challenging the accuracy and relevance of NIH's success rate since the funding crunch began in the late 1980s. But there are two aspects to this year's research-funding drive that are very new indeed. Federal research officials, research-funding lobbies, and some key lawmakers have picked up the theme that was advanced by an array of research societies last year, that science must advance on a broad front-for example, that crucial breakthroughs for biomedical research, which is still Congress' darling, may come in a physics lab. "Most of the revolutionary changes that have occurred in biology and medicine are rooted in new methods," Varmus said in his AAAS speech. "Those, in turn, are usually rooted in fundamental discoveries in many different fields. . . . In short, biology is not only for biologists." Even more basically, the terms of debate have changed. "We all need to get out of the mind-set of a government-finance debate which is driven by the deficit," says former Appropriations staffer Stephens. "Since the 1970s, the entire policy debate has been driven by, 'How do we get the deficit down?' But we now have a revenue base which would appear to be in balance and to allow, without new taxes, some new investments. And it's a different world." Bruce Agnew is a science writer based in Bethesda, Md.

Congress Begins Shaping A Research Bonanza

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