US budget battles resume

With just 3 weeks left before they are scheduled to adjourn for the year, members of the US Senate and the US House of Representatives reconvened yesterday (September 7) to take up contentious budget appropriations for nearly every federal agency, including the National Institutes of Health (NIH) and the National Science Foundation (NSF).But lawmakers, facing a truncated election-year schedule and burdened with some of the tightest discretionary spending constraints in recent years, are not likely to forge budget agreements for the fiscal year beginning October 1, congressional sources and research advocates say. As has happened in the previous 2 years, Congress will likely approve a series of continuing resolutions to keep the government funded until budget bills can be passed, reconciled, and signed into law, probably wrapped in an omnibus spending package. While a December "lame duck" legislative session is possible, lawmakers of both parties generally prefer not to make substantive budget decisions until a new Congress convenes in January. "I wouldn't be surprised if the budget's a long time happening," said Paul Kincade, president of the Federation of American Societies for Experimental Biology (FASEB). "I think our champions in the Senate would like to find more money, and people in the House would too," he told The Scientist. "But that's pipe-dreaming."The full Senate, unable to approve an overall budget framework, has approved funding only for the Department of Defense (DoD). Senate appropriations subcommittees, lacking spending allocations, have not begun writing budget bills for their respective agencies. Compared to the Senate, the full House has moved relatively quickly on the majority of budget bills, approving 10 of 13 appropriations measures for fiscal year 2005 prior to the August recess.But House members have not yet voted on budgets for NIH, NSF, and other agencies having significant research activities. Those bills have been approved by the House Appropriations Committee and await action on the House floor. The NIH budget, included in the Labor, Health and Human Services appropriations bill, is expected to be considered by the full House today (September 8), said Craig Higgins, subcommittee clerk for the House Appropriations Subcommittee on Labor, Health and Human Services, Education, and Related Agencies. "We could speculate on the likelihood of progress, but it would be only that–speculation," he said yesterday.On July 14, the House Appropriations Committee approved the administration's budget request for NIH of $28.5 billion, a 2.6% increase of $727 million over the current year's funding. (Allocations from other subcommittees and mandatory research appropriations would lift the agency's funding to $28.8 billion.) In a statement, Kincade termed the action "unprecedented, the lowest percentage increase that NIH has received in nearly 2 decades." "It's not just NIH but a whole host of programs," said Dave Moore, associate vice president for governmental relations at the Association of American Medical Colleges (AAMC). "It's a very Spartan budget. There's not enough money to make everybody who has a stake in that bill satisfied," he told The Scientist. Funding for the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), for instance, would be cut by 3.2% to $4.2 billion, a reduction of $138 million.Unlike previous years the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID), tasked with research on bioterrorism and countermeasures, is not the clear winner among NIH's institutes and centers. For fiscal 2005, NIAID would grow by 3.2% or $137 million to $4.44 billion, second to the National Cancer Institute ($4.87 billion). Increases for NIH's 27 institutes and centers range from 2.2% to 3.3%.The outlook for NSF appears even bleaker. On July 22, the House Appropriations Committee cut NSF's budget to $5.5 billion, $278 million less than the administration's request and $111 million, or 2%, less than current year's funding. The bill would allocate $6 million to continue planning and designing the long-delayed National Ecological Observatory Network (NEON), but not for construction.The Senate, embroiled in an ongoing procedural dispute, has not passed a fiscal year 2005 spending bill. But Senate Republican leaders attached an $821.4 billion spending cap to the DoD bill that President George W. Bush signed in August, allowing budget allocations to be established for the various Senate appropriations subcommittees, a necessary first step.A Senate appropriations staff member said yesterday (September 7) that the NIH budget measure is "tentatively" scheduled for subcommittee markup tomorrow (September 9). But the Senate leadership still hasn't decided how its budget process will be structured. One possibility is to wrap an omnibus appropriations package into the Homeland Security spending bill before the October recess.The budgets passed by the House Appropriations Committee for the NIH, the NSF, and the CDC could be changed when these bills come to the House floor. But as in the Senate, it is not clear whether these measures will be taken individually or wrapped into an omnibus package with other bills. Republicans and Democrats have not agreed on the timing for considering these measures. "They will try to wrap-up by as early in October as possible," Moore said. But so far, the odds do not look promising, he added.

US budget battles resume

Congress back in session, but prospects dim for timely passage of NIH, NSF spending bills

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