US-Funded Researcher Salaries to Drop?

A draft 2012 spending bill would cut the maximum salary paid to biomedical scientists by grants from NIH, CDC, and other federal agencies.

Written byBob Grant

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WIKIMEDIA COMMONS, UNITED STATES FEDERAL GOVERNMENT

A House of Representatives version of a 2012 spending bill, which would set next year's budgets for federal research agencies under the Department of Health and Human Services (DHHS), contains a proposal to trim the maximum amount a principle investigator on a grant from one of those agencies can receive. The draft bill, which was submitted in late September, would ratchet down the maximum salary on grantees receiving funds from the National Institutes of Health, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, and other DHHS agencies from $199,700 to $165,300, a drop of about 17 percent. The Senate version of the 2012 DHHS spending bill leaves the salary cap unchanged, even though it proposes cutting the overall NIH budget by $190 million.

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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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