Top Researchers In PHS Positions To Get Pay Hikes

New legislation designed to reward outstanding scientists might help to keep them in the Public Health Service ranks Attracting senior-level scientists to Public Health Service jobs in the Department of Health and Human Services and keeping them there has been tough over the past 10 years. Congressmen, policymakers, and other government officials contend that scientists have been leaving government service for better opportunities and agencies have had difficulty replacing them because their salaries have been 50 to 60 percent lower than those in industry or academia. In the past, bills to authorize significant salary increases for select government scientific staff have been introduced in Congress, but have failed. New legislation, however, should finally begin to reverse this trend by offering financial rewards to a few hundred of these Public Health Service (PHS) scientists. Silvio O. Conte was the man behind the creation of the Senior Biomedical Research Service (SBRS). How did the now-deceased Republican representative from the 1st District of Massachusetts succeed in creating SBRS when for the past decade all similar initiatives couldn't make it? A past program dealing with pay increases for Public Health Service scientists, for example, was attached to a version of an NIH reauthorization bill, but the legislation was killed because it contained fetal research provisions. At another time, Congress was more interested in providing raises to researchers at other federal agencies that were having problems recruiting scientists. "Conte was successful because he was the senior ranking Republican of the House appropriations committee," says PHS's Anthony Iteilag. "He was able to attach SBRS onto an appropriations bill that dealt with other federal pay reform. Since he was on the committee, he could watch and negotiate any changes on the bill every step of the way." Conte, who died of cancer Feb. 8, 1991, at the age of 69, was the senior ranking member of the appropriations committee that controls the government's purse strings, and had the option (along with the chairman) to vote in any of the 13 appropriations subcommittees. Conte often chose to sit on the Subcommittee on Labor, Health and Human Services, and Education, which oversees PHS. "Every bill that moved through Congress went past him," says a committee staffer. "The climate for SBRS was particularly right last year because Congress was grappling with the issue of giving qualified people throughout all of government a salary more competitive with the private sector. So it went through." Conte's history as a friend of science is being acknowledged by the National Institutes of Health's naming a building under construction in Bethesda, Md., for him. He was also the author of the resolution signed by President Bush designating the 1990s the Decade of the Brain, to draw attention to research opportunities and advances in neurosciences. Says Frederick Goodwin, administrator of the Alcohol, Drug Abuse, and Mental Health Administration, "The tragic thing is that Conte is not alive to see the program that he developed [SBRS] come to fruition." --R.E. Under Public Law 101-509, signed last November, as many as 350 of them, designated as "outstanding in the field of biomedical research or clinical research evaluation," could see their annual salaries rise this year to a maximum of $138,900 from their present $60,000 to $108,000 range. The new program, called the Senior Biomedical Research Service (SBRS), was the result of political maneuvering and savvy by a now-deceased friend of science, congressman Silvio O. Conte (R-Mass.) (see Close-Up on page 7). "Besides helping to retain and recruit senior people to the government agencies, SBRS gives hope to younger people who are looking for some vertical movement in government service," says Frederick Goodwin, administrator of the Alcohol, Drug Abuse, and Mental Health Administration (ADAMHA) and a member of the secretary of Health and Human Services' (HHS) advisory committee on the SBRS program. "It creates real opportunities for someone who wants to become a government scientist." While there has been some concern raised by Sen. Orrin Hatch (R-Utah) that the Bush administration may cut 350 positions in one part of government to pay the salary increases for the 350 SBRS positions, no one will confirm whether this is the case. HHS staffers will say, however, that finding money in the agencies for SBRS should cause few problems. "You are talking about a couple of million dollars being added to a salary pool of multibillion-dollar agencies," says Eugene Kinlow, deputy assistant secretary for personnel management at HHS. "We are not talking about a major problem. This is an ordinary management problem that government does when it reallocates and makes decisions about how it spends money every day." Although the mechanics of SBRS are currently being worked out by HHS secretary Louis Sullivan, appointees, say scientists and policymakers on the advisory committee, will constitute a corps of elite, well-paid scientists, chosen by peer review, who work at the different PHS agencies. According to the legislation, those eligible for the new salary designation are scientists with Ph.D.'s in biomedical science or in a related discipline who are now employed or who will be employed by the National Institutes of Health, ADAMHA, the Food and Drug Administration (FDA), the Centers for Disease Control (CDC), and the Agency for Health Care Policy and Research (HCPR). They also must be deemed "outstanding" by criteria being determined by Sullivan. Money to pay for SBRS, if it is to get off the ground this year as scheduled, will come from the agencies' current budgets, not from any additional appropriations. In future years each agency would continue to pay for its SBRS appointees. "The advisory committee has been meeting since last December to try to define what was meant by the bill," says J. Edward Rall, a committee member and NIH deputy director of intramural research. "Our interpretation has followed the language of the law so that the salary raises would only apply to scientists, and not administrators, and also to FDA scientists who do clinical evaluation of drugs and new medical devices. The operative word in our deliberations, though, was `outstanding.' " Other issues that faced the SBRS advisory committee, which in mid-March presented a confidential report of its recommendations to Sullivan, included how to set up a system that would: divide the 350 salary slots among the different agencies; determine how many of them would go to current employees or to new recruits; and evaluate eligibility of the candidates for the raises. The committee consisted of representatives from the affected agencies: Alan Anderson, director of Office of Science and Technology in the Center of Devices and Radiology at the FDA; Claire Broom, assistant director for science at the CDC; Rall of NIH; Goodwin of ADAMHA; and Donald Goldstone, director of the Center for General Health Services, Intramural Research, at HCPR. It was cochaired by HHS's Kinlow and Anthony Iteilag, deputy assistant secretary for health management operations at PHS. According to Iteilag, the committee suggested to Sullivan that he establish an oversight board that would determine the number of SBRS positions that would go to each agency from nominations submitted to it. Board members would include scientists from the five agencies as well as representatives from HHS. None of the board members would be eligible for SBRS. "The board would serve as a peer review mechanism," says PHS's Iteilag. "Scientists are in the best position to judge the qualifications of other scientists." The oversight board would also have the authority to do a periodic review of SBRS and to implement changes, if necessary. After each agency knows how many SBRS slots it has, a credentialing committee at the agency level would then do the final selection of "superstar" scientists nominated by institute directors or division heads, says Iteilag. "A fair amount of discretion would be given to each of the agencies to decide how it wants to use those slots--whether they would prefer to elevate a person already there or whether they want to recruit for a particular position," he says. For ADAMHA's Goodwin, "the flexibility and independence given to the agencies to choose their appointees and salary levels" is the key feature of SBRS that makes it unique among federal salary promotion programs. Although all of the agencies have more than enough qualified people they can recommend for the 350 SBRS slots, their officials say, some will probably be given more positions than the others. "We understand that we [NIH] will be getting a substantial number of positions," said Bernadine Healy, the new director of the NIH at her confirmation hearings last month. But until Sullivan finalizes the program, the concept of an oversight board and a credentialing committee are still only recommendations. Under the law, Sullivan has the power to distribute SBRS slots as he sees fit. And even after that, there remain a few bureaucratic hoops that SBRS has to go through. "We are hopeful that the whole thing could get implemented in a few months," says Kinlow. "We are getting to the end of a process that began in December. Once we have the secretary's decision, we have to develop regulations and send them to the Office of Management and Budget. That could cause more negotiations and discussion. No one can predict right now how long it will take, but we've finished the steps that have taken the most time."

Top Researchers In PHS Positions To Get Pay Hikes

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