The across-the-board cuts known as sequestration, which went into effect on 1 March, are having a “substantial impact” on medical research, the director of the National Institutes of Health, Francis Collins, said in testimony before a Senate committee.
“If the Budget-Control-Act-imposed caps on discretionary programs continue, and NIH funding is reduced proportionally in the next 10 years, funding will decline by about $19 billion,” Collins testified. He said the consequences of such reduction would be harmful to scientific progress and to American leadership in science. The agency’s budget at present is just less than $31 billion.
NIH-funded investigators are already feeling the effects as its institutes and centers are forced to fund a lower percentage of grant applications, the NIH chief said. The agency funded 8,986 competing research project grants in fiscal year 2012, and that number is projected to drop to 8,283 in FY2013, Collins said. This trend is also reflected in NIH’s total research portfolio, as Collins said he expects that the agency will fund 34,902 research project grants this year compared with 36,259 in FY2012.
“With this new reality, more and more investigators will be unable to pursue the bold ideas that NIH has traditionally supported,” Collins warned the lawmakers.
On 16 May, the Federation of American Societies for Experimental Biology released an analysis of NIH funding trends that underscores the sequestration’s negative impact. In constant dollars, which are adjusted for inflation, FASEB found that NIH’s budget in FY 2013 is at its lowest level since FY2000.
Although NIH’s budget has soared from $11.3bn in FY1995 to more than $30.8bn in FY2012, when it comes to the number of investigator-initiated R01 equivalent awards, the agency has actually seen a drop of 7 percent over that time period, according to FASEB. In terms of R01 equivalent grant funding success rates, FASEB found that the figure has dropped nearly a third from FY1995 to FY2012, falling from 25.9 per cent to 18.4 per cent, the group said.
That trend is not unexpected considering how the number of NIH research project grant applications skyrocketed from 25,225 in FY1995 to 51,313 in FY2012, according to FASEB’s analysis.
Meanwhile, the Obama administration has requested a budget of $31.33bn for NIH in FY2014. At the Senate hearing, Collins testified that this proposal, which represents a 1.5 per cent increase on FY2012, would allow the agency to support 10,269 competing research project grants in FY2014, an increase of 1,283 compared with FY2012. Overall, NIH anticipates funding a total of 36,610 research project grants under the administration’s FY2014 request.