Washington

The recent, rapid expansion of the US National Institutes of Health (NIH) seems to be over — at least for now.

On 19 June, the House of Representatives subcommittee that sets spending for the biomedical research agency recommended a budget increase of just over 2% for next year. That would take the NIH budget to $27.7 billion — similar to the level proposed by President Bush back in February, but not enough for research advocates.

“This is really bad news,” says Steven Teitelbaum, a cell biologist at the Washington University at St Louis, Missouri, and president of the Federation of American Societies for Experimental Biology (FASEB). “I have lost a lot of sleep over this — there's no doubt this is a crash landing for the NIH.”

Congress has traditionally supported strong spending on biomedical research — it was its appropriations subcommittees that implemented a doubling of the NIH's budget from $13.6 billion in 1998 to $27.3 billion this year.

Lobby groups had appealed to Congress to provide more money to maintain the momentum from the doubling. According to FASEB, the proposed numbers will allow the NIH to fund just 344 new grants next year, of which only 21 will support research unconnected to bioterrorism. That is because almost all of the proposed budget will be eaten up by multi-year grants that were awarded while the NIH was growing.

A Senate subcommittee will deliver its NIH budget this week, and the two versions will then be reconciled to give a final figure. But research lobbyists don't expect the Senate to offer much more cash than the House — and they fear that the NIH could now face several years of essentially flat budgets.