The US National Institutes of Health (NIH) budget request for the fiscal year (FY) 2013 is ∼$30.9 billion, the same amount it received for FY 2012. Yet the NIH maintains that it will continue to increase the number of new, competing research project grants (RPGs) it distributes, awarding 672 more in FY 2013 than in FY 2012 at an average cost of ∼$431,000 each. To accomplish this, the NIH needs to find new mechanisms to redistribute funds—mechanisms by which some will lose and some will gain.

To enable continued growth in the number of competing RPGs, the NIH says that it will decrease the value of both competing and noncompeting RPGs (whose funding is contingent on the submission of a progress report) by 1% below FY 2012 amounts and eliminate built-in inflationary increases. Another strategy—which may or may not succeed in generating a sizeable surplus—is to pay greater attention to applications from grantees who already receive more than $1.5 million annually in total funds from the NIH. Those applicants affected by this proposed strategy make up 6% of all extramural NIH-funded principal investigators. A related policy has been in place at the National Institute of General Medical Sciences since 1998.

Some of the strategies for belt tightening in the budget request come from a report issued by the NIH in October 2011 entitled “Ways of Managing NIH Resources” and the responses it generated from the scientific community. The report presented suggestions for tackling a flat—or declining—budget and calculations of the effects on new RPG awards. The four key suggestions of the report included reducing the amount of money per NIH grant by $25,000, restricting the numbers of grants an investigator can hold, capping the total award value held by an investigator and reducing the salaries of principal investigators.

However, none of these four suggestions has been adopted in the 2013 budget request, and the NIH has stated that the greater scrutiny of grant applications from recipients of large amounts of NIH dollars will not constitute a cap on their funding. Interestingly, the report calculated that limiting total per-investigator NIH support to $1 million would free up funds for 2,000 more competing RPGs and that 20% of principal investigators receive 50% of the RPG funds (a figure that has changed little since 1986). These numbers suggest that the NIH could do more—if necessary—with its funds.

Why is the NIH hesitant to impose more substantial changes to its allocation of resources? All researchers are loath to see their funds reduced, and some object to a perceived redistribution of wealth to new and unproven labs at the expense of more experienced investigators. But there is always waste in science, as in any industry, and it's not unreasonable to think that a $25,000 cut per grant across the board—which would sustain growth in the number of competing RPGs—might improve the efficiency of biomedical research. Doing too little to increase funding opportunities risks driving the best young minds away from science and could harm scientific output in the long run.

As it is, there is an imbalance between the number of biomedical trainees and the number of available academic positions in the United States, which may also hinder the recruitment into science of outstanding future principal investigators. On June 14, a report released by the NIH Biomedical Workforce Working Group detailed its recommendations to promote a more sustainable biomedical research workforce in the United States. These suggestions include limiting NIH support to graduate students to six years and using NIH training grants to institutions and individual fellowships to pay for more graduate student and postdoctoral researcher salaries. The report also recommends increasing the salaries and improving the benefits of postdoctoral researchers, doubling the number of awards for postdoctoral researchers transitioning to tenure-track faculty positions and creating new programs to help graduate students identify or investigate career alternatives to research-based pursuits.

Although they are certainly laudable, financial support for these diverse initiatives must come from somewhere. But by making trainees more expensive, Shirley Tilghman, co-chair of the working group, acknowledged that implementing the report's recommendations would probably slow the growth of the biomedical research workforce, perhaps forcing greater efficiency and more productive use of restricted funds. Similar recommendations to the NIH have been made in the past, prior to the doubling of the NIH budget, but they were not implemented. However, given the current economic climate, the NIH may heed this report's suggestions to focus spending and help retain those individuals most likely to succeed in a research-oriented career.

If the FY 2013 NIH budget request is not approved by September 30, the NIH budget would be reduced—perhaps by ∼10% as a result of the US Budget Control Act. More severe measures would then presumably be required, although these have yet to be articulated. And regardless of the budgetary outcome, it's clear that the growth of science funding in the United States will be slower than it has been in the recent past. Therefore, it's time to adjust the scientific community's thinking accordingly and recognize the importance of ensuring a continued influx of new, high-quality researchers and of finding equitable funding solutions to sustain scientific advance.