Overall, federal science fares well in President Barack Obama's recently announced FY2010 linkurl:budget,;http://www.whitehouse.gov/omb/budget/Overview/ 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...

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