NIH: stimulated but flat

The National Institutes of Health -- the happy recipient of about $10 billion from the recently-passed economic stimulus bill -- is staring down the barrel of another year of flat funding, according to the draft linkurl:FY2009 budget;http://appropriations.house.gov/FY2009_consolidated.shtml released yesterday by the House of Representatives. Image: linkurl:flickr/borman818;http://www.flickr.com/photos/dborman2/ The FY2009 Omnibus Appropriations Act includes a paltry 3% increase to NIH's FY200

Written byBob Grant

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Image: linkurl:flickr/borman818;http://www.flickr.com/photos/dborman2/

The FY2009 Omnibus Appropriations Act includes a paltry 3% increase to NIH's FY2008 budget. The bill indicates that $30.3 billion will go to the NIH "for lifesaving research into diseases such as Alzheimer's, cancer and diabetes," which only amounts to a $938 million increase above 2008's budget, "so that NIH can capitalize on unprecedented scientific opportunities with almost 10,600 new research grants." Howard Garrison, a spokesperson for the Federation of American Societies for Experimental Biology (FASEB), told __The Scientist__ that the '09 NIH budget did not come as a surprise. "It's not a healthy increase," Garrison said, "but it is an increase. And it's what we were expecting." Other government science agencies fare a little better than the NIH in the bill. The Food and Drug Administration would get $2 billion, or $335 million above its 2008 budget, and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention would receive $6.6 billion, $239 million above last year. National Science Foundation funding would be bumped by 7% to 6.9 billion, a reasonable increase given the $3 billion increase it received in the stimulus bill. The numbers may yet change as the bill gets tossed around the House and Senate floors before a final vote.
**__Related stories:__***linkurl:Flat funding for NIH in 2009;http://www.the-scientist.com/blog/display/55450/
[23rd February 2009]*linkurl:How to spend the NIH stimulus;http://www.the-scientist.com/blog/display/55413/
[11th February 2009]

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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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