National Institute Of Health Program

House panels use “emergency” to boost NIH, DOE science budgets
By Science News StaffJul. 7, 2020 , 7:10 PM
This week, spending panels in the U.S. House of Representatives began voting on bills to fund the government, and a few of them made use of an emergency mechanism to beef up research budgets. The National Institutes of Health (NIH) and the national laboratories funded by the Department of Energy’s (DOE’s) Office of Science were the big winners, receiving a combined additional $11.25 billion. But to date, the other federal research agencies have come away empty-handed.
The panels were operating under a tight spending cap adopted by Congress last year for the 2021 fiscal year that begins on 1 October. It limits the rise in overall spending on domestic discretionary programs, which includes all nonmilitary research, to $5 billion over 2020 levels. That’s less than 1% in a budget of $627 billion.
But lawmakers retained the option of exempting some activities from the cap by declaring them to be emergency spending. With the arrival of COVID-19, that safety valve also provided a mechanism for science advocates to argue for larger research budgets to help universities deal with disruptions caused by the global pandemic. Last month, a bipartisan group of legislators in the House of Representatives introduced a bill, the Research Investment to Spark the Economy (RISE) Act, that would authorize spending $26 billion across several federal research agencies to do exactly that.

The NIH supports $31 billion in research annually, given to more than 300,000 researchers at more than 2,500 institutions for research into a variety of conditions.[2] Each institute of the NIH has separate appropriations from Congress determined on an annual basis. Percentages of grant applications funded vary by institute, from 8% (National Institute of Nursing Research) to 29.6% (National Institute of General Medical Sciences), with an overall average of 18%. Funding percentages have dropped from over 30% in the early 2000s, mainly due to an increase in applications, rather than a decrease in funds available. In 1998, 24,100 applications were received, and 7,500 were funded with a total of $1.9 billion. By 2005, the number of applications had grown to 43,000, of which 9,600 were funded with a total of $3.4 billion. In 2015, 52,000 applications were submitted and 9,500 were funded with $4.3 billion.[3] Grants are assessed based on their significance, innovation, and approach