US House Committee Proposes Increases to Research Funding

Although many of the hikes are less than what the Biden administration had requested, the draft legislation calls for a boost in spending for agencies like NASA, the National Institutes of Health, and the Department of Energy.

Written byAnnie Melchor

| 2 min read

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Subcommittees of the United States House Appropriations Committee met earlier this week (July 12) to advance drafts of federal spending legislation for fiscal year 2022, which begins on October 1 of this year.

According to Science, the proposed legislation would result in funding increases of 15 percent for the National Institutes of Health (NIH), 13 percent for the National Science Foundation (NSF), 8 percent for NASA, and 4 percent for the Department of Energy (DOE) Office of Science.

Of the proposed $6.5 billion increase for the NIH, nearly half is designated to establish the Advanced Research Projects Agency for Health. This new entity is designed to accelerate research to “develop breakthroughs to prevent, detect, and treat diseases like Alzheimer’s, diabetes, and cancer,” President Joe Biden told Congress in April.

“It’s the opportunity to take on large, high risk projects quickly in an entrepreneurial way,” NIH ...

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Meet the Author

Annie Melchor
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Stephanie "Annie" Melchor got her PhD from the University of Virginia in 2020, studying how the immune response to the parasite Toxoplasma gondii leads to muscle wasting and tissue scarring in mice. While she is still an ardent immunology fangirl, she left the bench to become a science writer and received her master’s degree in science communication from the University of California, Santa Cruz, in 2021. You can check out more of her work here.
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