washington

A joint spending committee of the US Senate and House of Representatives last week approved a 7.1 per cent funding increase for the National Institutes of Health (NIH) — to $13.65 billion — in the fiscal year 1998, in a bill reconciling differences between the two legislative bodies.

Such a bill would normally move speedily to the floor of the House and then the Senate for final passage. But as soon as the politicians had signed off the massive bill last Thursday (30 October) it became captive to a sharp feud between Republican factions in Congress, and between Congress and the White House, over an unrelated education measure it contains concerning national examinations in reading and mathematics.

As a result, Newt Gingrich (Republican, Georgia), the Speaker of the House, barred the bill from proceeding to the House floor. At the beginning of this week, it was unclear whether Gingrich would order the reopening of negotiations on the $269-billion bill, which funds the Departments of Labor, Health and Human Services, and Education.

According to John Porter (Republican, Illinois), who chairs the House appropriations subcommittee responsible for NIH funding, a likely alternative is that the bill will be bundled together with several other outstanding spending bills containing equally controversial measures. These would go to a single vote on the House floor, perhaps as early as this week.

As it contains so many spending provisions, such an ‘omnibus’ bill would be intended to force politicians to “swallow hard and pass it”, says David Moore, a lobbyist for the Association of American Medical Colleges. It would also make it more difficult for the White House to veto the larger bill.

Whatever the outcome of the impasse on examinations, Porter said last Friday that he was confident that the NIH increase is secure. “Unless there is a complete breakdown, which I don't contemplate, NIH will receive a 7.1 per cent increase for the next fiscal year,” he said.

The earlier House version of the appropriations bill had contained a 6 per cent increase for NIH, while its Senate counterpart had sought 7.5 per cent. The committee's bill also provides the NIH with authority to spend $100 million on research into Parkinson's disease in 1998, and allocates nearly $17 million to begin construction of an AIDS vaccine research centre — reduced from an earlier House figure of $26.1 million.

In another change, Tom Harkin (Democrat, Iowa) succeeded in boosting by two-thirds the budget of NIH's controversial Office of Alternative Medicine (see Nature 389, 652; 652; 1997). The bill as approved by the committee provides $20 million to the office. Its current budget is $12 million and NIH's director, Harold Varmus, had called for that to be cut to $7.5 million.

Also last Friday, Porter repeated his intention to seek an additional $2.5- $3 billion for NIH in 1999 as part of a drive to double its budget over the next five years. The increase could be funded, he said, by government revenues that had not been anticipated during the drafting of a balanced budget agreement that set tight caps on such new spending.

“There may be some very strong rationale for varying to some degree the balanced budget agreement to allow us to have this initiative on research,” said Porter. “Given the good economy, it's a good time to propose it.”

But he added that he was willing to drop the idea if NIH leaders feel that such a large, quick increase would overwhelm their capacity to deal efficiently and effectively with it. “We don't want to give them money they can't use wisely and for good research,” he said.