On February 13, President Obama released his Fiscal Year 2013 budget. This budget is merely a suggestion for Congress, not an actual budget that will be enacted as written.
In this draft budget:
- The National Institutes of Health is flat funded at a level of $30.7 billion
- The National Institute of Biomedical Imaging and Bioengineering (NIBIB) received $337 million, a reduction of about $1 million from Fiscal Year 2012
- Most of the other Institutes and Centers also received slight reductions
- The National Center for Advancing Translational Sciences (NCATS) received an increase of $63 million
While most Institutes and Centers will be seeing a slight decrease, the NIH will be implementing new grant management policies to help boost the number of new awards.
» The NIH is seeking to boost the number of new grants by 672 awards (8% of the total) by:
- Taking advantage of the current grant cycle that will see more awards entering their final year of renewal, which will in turn free up more funding
- Eliminating inflationary increases in out year budgets of both competing and noncompeting awards,
- Negotiating down the cost of competing awards during review,
- Implementing a 1% downward reduction to all existing grants, and
- Asking Institute Directors and Advisory Councils to give additional scrutiny to Principal Investigators (PIs) that already have $1.5 million in active funding.
Some relevant quotes from the budget documents:
“The budget supports Biomedical Research at NIH. Biomedical research contributes to improving the health of the American people as well as the economy. The Budget includes $31 billion for NIH to support research on-campus and at academic and independent research institutions across the country. Tomorrow’s advances in health care depend on today’s investments in basic research on the fundamental causes and mechanisms of disease, new technologies to accelerate discoveries, advancing translational sciences, and encouraging new investigators and new ideas. In 2013, NIH will implement new grants management policies to increase the number of new research grants.”
“The budget supports research at the National Institutes of Health that will accelerate the translation of new discoveries in biomedical science into new therapies and cures, along with initiatives at the Food and Drug Administration that will speed the approval of new medicines…This Budget also puts an emphasis on the basic research that leads to the breakthroughs of tomorrow, which increasingly is no longer being conducted by the private sector, as well as helping inventors bring their innovations from laboratory to market.”
“Biomedical research contributes to improving the health of the American people as well as the economy. Tomorrow’s advances in health care depend on today’s investments in basic research on the fundamental causes and mechanisms of disease, new technologies to accelerate discoveries, innovations in clinical research, and a robust pipeline of creative and skillful biomedical researchers. Although there are very tight discretionary caps, the Budget provides $30.7 billion for NIH, the same amount as 2012.”
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