Washington

The US National Institutes of Health (NIH) last week secured a 14.7 per cent increase in its budget for next year, achieving a remarkable triumph after an arduous congressional budget battle. The decision raises the biomedical agency's budget for the fiscal year 2000 to $17.9 billion.

The House of Representatives and the Senate approved the increase just before adjourning for the year after weeks of struggle with the White House over budget priorities. The sum was part of a $385 billion, ‘omnibus’ spending bill that combined five of the 13 bills funding the government.

Congress also last week approved a five-year extension to the research and development tax credit, which creates incentives for private industry to fund research projects.

The $2.3 billion in new NIH funding, which keeps the agency on track for doubling its budget in five years starting this year, comes with two strings attached. The agency must wait until next 29 September, the end of the fiscal year, for $3 billion of the overall budget. This is a budgetary device employed by Congress to allow it to appear to avoid spending Social Security revenues.

The NIH plans to handle the problem with ‘split funding’ — giving investigators part of their award at the time it is granted, and paying the remainder at the end of the fiscal year. Advocates see this as a big improvement on an earlier proposal that would have delayed $7.5 billion in NIH funding to late September, and forced the postponement of new grants until then.

The $3 billion deferral is “something that we can cope with,” says David Kaufman, president of the Federation of American Societies for Experimental Biology (FASEB) and a professor of pathology at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

In addition, the NIH, like other federal agencies, is expected to be subject to a 3.8 per cent across-the-board spending cut insisted on by Republicans as a symbol of fiscal austerity. This would slice $68 million from NIH's budget, lowering its effective increase to $2.23 billion, or 14.3 per cent. But the loss is not definite, as the bill allows the president to exempt certain agencies from cuts.

Such provisos were insufficient to dampen the enthusiastic reaction of research advocates. They said last week that the NIH had pulled off a tremendous coup in wresting such a large increase from a budget maelstrom that saw Republicans fighting to find budget savings in all conceivable areas.

“It's an outstanding outcome. We're just ecstatic,” says Tim Leshan, director of public policy at the American Society for Cell Biology. Considering that there were those in Congress who felt that the increase “was just too much too fast,” the new money is “a tremendous victory,” adds Mike Stephens, a FASEB lobbyist.

The bill includes a $45 million increase in the NIH budget for the construction of extramural facilities, taking it to $75 million. University administrators and NIH officials had been complaining that the agency's budget was insufficient for what they describe as the decaying infrastructure of US biomedical research facilities (Nature 399, 621; 1999.)