American Medical Research Is Getting Treated By the New Budget, Not Cured

The 2014 Omnibus Appropriations bill, legislation that will provide discretionary funding for the US federal government for the fiscal year, is expected to pass through the House of Representatives today. If the budget is passes the House and Senate as it’s expected to this week, America’s sciences will be in much better shape than they were during last year’s sequester. But despite getting additional funding for the National Institutes of Health, which will fund “385 additional research studies and trials,” the shrinking of America’s once-majority-sized slice of the world biomedical-research pie will likely continue.

As the $1.012 trillion budget for the federal government, the document is 1,582 pages long, so you—and your representative in Congress—can be forgiven for not picking over the whole thing. There’s a manageably sized, detailed summary available for perusing if you’re so inclined, and summaries are also available by section.

But just to pull out some science-related highlights, if the bill passes as it was released on Monday:

• The National Science Foundation (NSF) will receive $7.17 billion, an increase of 4.2 percent, but still shy of their proposed budget.
• The Department of Energy’s Office of Science will get $5.07 billion, an increase of 9.7 percent.
• The DOE’s Energy and Efficiency and Renewable Energy programs will receive $1.901 billion, an increase of 10.6 percent, in order “to advance biomass, electric vehicle, and energy efficient advanced manufacturing technologies.”
• The Advanced Research Projects Agency-Energy (ARPA-E) receives $280 million, an 11 percent increase, “to develop high-risk, but promising future energy technologies.”
• NIH’s 2014 budget will rise by 3.5 percent, to $29.9 billion.

This last one is interesting, especially in light of the study recently published in The New England Journal of Medicine, which found, as US News and World Reports put it, that “although the United States once accounted for more than three-quarters of the world's research spending, its share has continued to drop in recent years, while countries in Asia saw a dramatic increase.”

While, as David Moore, senior director of government relations for the Association of American Medical Colleges, told Science, “it’s hard not to be pleased with a billion-dollar increase,” the NIH budget is still below what the budget was before the sequester, that chopped the budget by $1.55 billion when it kicked in, and lead to a reduction of 640 competitive research grants.

The budget increase also won’t increase America’s share of global research spending, but, as the NEJM study points out, that isn’t really the government’s fault. The study concluded that the US’s decline in research spending was due to reduced investment from the private sector.

Again, from US News:

In 2007, industry investment accounted for more than 60 percent of the United States' research spending, at $83.3 billion. But by 2012, that number dropped by $12.9 billion, to $70.4 billion, while public investment—such as spending from the government, educational and research organizations and charities—held steady. Public spending in the United States actually increased from $48 billion in 2007 to $48.9 billion in 2012.

Just as cheap labor made Asia an appealing place for manufacturing, it also is an appealing place to invest in research and development. Japan and China increased their spending on biomedical research by $9 billion and $6.4 billion, respectively from 2007-2012, while American investment was dropping.

Studies have shown that biomedical research “jumpstarts high-wage job growth and keeps America globally competitive,” which sounds like something the government should be working towards anyway. The NEJM study, then, recommends both increasing NIH spending—which this budget incrementally does—and also create incentives for more private sector research to be done America—which America is going to figure out how to do. The new, post-sequester budget, at least, is moving in the right direction.