Job Creation, NIH Style

The 2009 stimulus funding channeled into the National Institutes of Health helped put scores of researchers and their support staffs to work.

Written byBob Grant

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WIKIMEDIA COMMONS, LUCAS

The money pumped into the National Institutes of Health in 2009 by the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act (ARRA)—more than $8 billion over 2 years—helped create thousands of jobs as the agency funded new and expanded grant programs, according to a government report released last month.

The Government Accounting Office (GAO), at the behest of Republican members of the House of Representatives, found that ARRA funding has created about one full-time equivalent position for each of the 21,500 grants NIH awarded since the bill's enactment. Though the total number of jobs is tricky to pin down because the positions are reported quarterly, the NIH told GAO officials that the controversial stimulus dollars could end up creating and supporting 54,000 jobs.

While scientists occupied about 58 ...

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Meet the Author

Bob Grant
From 2017 to 2022, Bob Grant was Editor in Chief of The Scientist, where he started in 2007 as a Staff Writer. Before joining the team, he worked as a reporter at Audubon and earned a master’s degree in science journalism from New York University. In his previous life, he pursued a career in science, getting a bachelor’s degree in wildlife biology from Montana State University and a master’s degree in marine biology from the College of Charleston in South Carolina. Bob edited Reading Frames and other sections of the magazine.
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