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A leading US senator is questioning whether the National Institutes of Health (NIH) can effectively spend the $2 billion, 15 per cent increase it received in the current fiscal year, and whether it should receive a similarly large boost next year.

Domenici: are the NIH's extra billions spent efficiently?

Senator Pete Domenici (Republican, New Mexico), the chairman of the Senate Budget Committee, says he may hold an unusual committee hearing in the spring to address the issue. “We want to make sure that the large increases are being used effectively and efficiently, not only for the good of science but for the good of the American taxpayer,” Domenici said last week.

Last month, at Domenici's instigation, top Budget Committee staff members led by Bill Hoagland, the committee's chief of staff, met Harold Varmus, the NIH director, and other institute directors. Officials from the Congressional Budget Office and the General Accounting Office also attended. Discussions centred on how NIH distributes funds among its institutes, how it sets research priorities, and how it takes public health needs into account in doing so.

“[NIH was] popping up on the radar screen as an outlier” because it received the single largest percentage increase of any agency in 1999, says Hoagland. “We wanted to make sure that the dollars were being used effectively.”

Varmus argues that the money is being spent wisely. “I see no difficulty in managing this increase, and subsequent increases of similar size,” he says. “It's crucial that we work with a steady growth plan.”

He adds that “every institute and centre has a series of very impressive plans” for handling the new money, which is funding “everything from over 1600 new research project grants to the sequencing of the mouse genome.”

Yesterday (13 January), Hoagland and other Budget Committee staff were scheduled to meet again with Francine Little, the director of NIH's Office of Financial Management. They planned to discuss whether it is using its $15.58 billion budget for fiscal year 1999, efficiently, or whether the $2 billion of new funds is presenting a money management problem.

Hoagland says he wants to know “what plans they have for how they're going to use these monies. Or are they going to be faced with a situation where they cannot manage the resources in a way that is most efficient? In that case I would suggest they are getting too much.”

This is strenuously denied by Varmus, who says that “casual” comments that the NIH might be unable to handle the new money are “very damaging to the research enterprise.” Varmus adds: “We have no trouble at all in managing the 1999 increase, giving it very careful attention and accounting for every penny.” He says he is sure that Hoagland will agree after looking at the evidence.

Separately, unnamed biomedical research lobbyists last week protested at what they say will be a 2.1 per cent, $328 million increase for the NIH in the White House's proposed budget for the year 2000, due to be released in the first week of February. The research community wants an increase closer to the 15 per cent of 1999. Last year, the Clinton administration asked for 8.4 per cent.