President Obama’s Fiscal Year (FY) 2013 budget recommendations announced February 13, 2012 include flat funding for the National Institutes of Health and a 4.8% increase for the National Science Foundation. Medical and Prosthetic Research at the Department of Veterans Affairs would be increased by 0.3%.
The FY 2013 budget plan was developed in the shadow of the 2011 Budget Control Act (BCA), which requires that discretionary spending be cut by $1 trillion over the next 10 years. The bill also had a provision giving authority to a special congressional committee to come up with a plan to achieve deficit reduction. However, because the so-called super committee failed to reach agreement, federal agencies will also face the prospect of a 7 to 10% reduction next year, although this is not discussed in the budget proposal. These cuts, known as sequestration, will go into effect in January 2013 unless Congress comes up with an alternative plan.
NATIONAL INSTITUTES OF HEALTH: In its briefing materials, NIH characterized its $30.7 billion budget request as “preserv[ing] NIH’s highest priority activities within overall budgetary constraints.” The proposed budget would fund a pool of about 9,400 new and competing grants, an increase of about 8%. The increased number of grants will come about by reducing noncompeting grant budgets by 1%, discontinuing inflation-based increases for the subsequent years of grants, and limiting the growth in the average size of awards. During a budget briefing, NIH Director Francis Collins said the size of the new and competing grant cohort is also due to “more churn in the system,” including a decrease in the average duration of grants plus the fact that a large number are coming up for renewal in FY 2013. Other grant policies NIH plans to implement include equalizing the success rates of new and established investigators and providing additional scrutiny to new grants for principal investigators who already have grants with $1.5 million or more in total costs.
According to Collins, 54% of NIH’s funds will support basic research and 46% will support applied research, a proportion that has been more or less constant in recent years. Nevertheless, the budget does include notable increases in some disease-specific and applied research. On February 7, even before the budget was released, President Obama announced that NIH would allocate $50 million to Alzheimer’s disease research in the current fiscal year and another $80 million in FY 2013. The budget also includes a $64 million or 11% increase for the new National Center for Advancing Translational Sciences (NCATS) that will bring its funding level to $639 million. According to an NIH budget handout, the mission of NCATS is to “reengineer elements of the development pipeline that moves basic research findings into new diagnostics and therapeutics.”
Research advocates have expressed concern about the cumulative loss of purchasing power in the NIH budget. According to David Moore of the Association of American Medical Colleges, the budget is about 20% smaller than it was a decade ago when adjusted for inflation. FASEB Director of Legislative Relations Jennifer Zeitzer told Nature that the president’s request “is not what we need to take advantage of the scientific opportunities that are before us.”
FASEB recommended $32 billion for NIH in FY 2013.
NATIONAL SCIENCE FOUNDATION: The National Science Foundation is slated to receive an additional $340 million (4.8% increase) in FY 2013 to bring its budget total to $7.37 billion. This is part of a broader administration initiative to increase the federal investment in non-defense research and development. (For budgetary purposes, NIH funds are considered health spending rather than science.) The overall budget request for Research and Related Activities overall is $5.98 billion, which represents a 5.2% increase of $294.2 million. However, the Biological Sciences (BIO) Directorate’s increase is only 3% ($21.5 million) for a total budget of $733.8 million. The BIO Directorate provides about 62% of federal funding for non-medical, basic life sciences research at U.S. academic institutions.
The increase for Education and Human Resources (EHR) at NSF will be $4.6 million or 5.6%. The total budget for EHR will be $875.6 million. One new education initiative is Expeditions in Education, a $49 million program is intended to “integrate, leverage, and expand STEM education research and development to improve learning in science and engineering disciplines and capitalize on the scientific assets across NSF.”
FASEB recommended at least $7.3 billion for NSF.
VA MEDICAL AND PROSTHETIC RESEARCH: The Medical and Prosthetic Research program at the Department of Veterans Affairs will receive a $2 million increase, amounting to 0.3% above its FY 2012 level. VA estimates that with a $583 million budget it will be able to fund 2,209 research grants in FY 2013. These projects will include support for “fundamentally new directions for VA research,” such as developing new models of care, improving social reintegration following traumatic brain injury, reducing suicide, evaluating the effectiveness of complementary and alternative medicine, developing blood tests to assist in the diagnosis of post-traumatic stress disorder and mild traumatic brain injury, and advancing genomic medicine in VA through the use of new technology.
FASEB recommended $621 for VA Medical and Prosthetic research.