Sequester Cuts and the NIH's Budget

[Wally]

http://news.sciencemag.org/funding/...en-nih-grant-success-rates-down-14-2013?rss=1

The automatic spending cuts and other reductions to the National Institutes of Health’s (NIH’s) budget this year have caused slightly less damage than expected, NIH Director Francis Collins said yesterday. Preliminary data show that about 50 more grants were funded than projected, he said at a forum sponsored by Research!America. But success rates may have plunged even further than the agency predicted.
NIH’s budget shrunk by 5.5% this year, to $29.15 billion. As a result, NIH expects to fund about 650 fewer grants than it did the previous year. About 150, or nearly a quarter, of those grants were from investigators hoping to renew their award, Collins said. “We’re losing what we’ve already invested in,” he lamented during a panel discussion. In May, NIH had estimated that it would make 703 fewer new and competing awards for a total of 8283, but the new figure bumps that up to 8336.
The success rate—the number of proposals receiving funding divided by the number of proposals reviewed—could drop as low as 14% or 15%, Collins told ScienceInsider. That is lower than the 17% rate that NIH had anticipated. A larger than expected rise in applications this year could be the cause of the stiffer competition.
And “it ain’t over,” Collins told his audience. Congress has not yet approved any spending bills for the 2014 fiscal year, which begins on 1 October. Instead, legislators are likely to pass a temporary stop-gap funding measure known as a continuing resolution, which would freeze agency budgets at the 2013 level until further notice. If that happens, Collins said, “we will lose another $600 million” along with several hundred more grants. (A Senate panel approved a bill that would erase this year’s sequester cut and give the agency $30.95 billion in 2014, but the House of Representatives, which has not released its version of the bill, has proposed cuts to the overall federal spending that could translate into another $5 billion cut for NIH, according to an analysis by the Federation of American Societies for Experimental Biology.)
Collins’s message to NIH’s supporters: “I still don’t think we’ve activated our case sufficiently. … We should be making a lot of noise.”

 

[Wally]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Budget_sequestration_in_2013

Under sequestration, agencies that fund research and development would see their budgets cut 5.1 to 7.3 percent in 2013 and remain stagnant through 2021.[27] In the next three years, this reduction in R&D is projected to decrease the number of jobs by 600,000. The Information Technology & Innovation Foundation estimates sequestration will reduce GDP by $200 billion compared to a scenario where R&D funding were fixed at 2011 amounts and by $565 billion compared to a scenario where R&D funding grows in proportion to output.[27]

The current Director of the National Institutes of Health (NIH), Francis S. Collins, "I worry desperately this means we will lose a generation of young scientists." Grant applications are already funded at half their historic rate, and with the sequester the chances of approval are expected to decrease even further.[28] Former NIH head Dr. Elias Zerhouni argued that the sequester would have a substantial impact on the future of scientific research. Since the NIH will have to continue to fund existing research, the sequester will fall heavily on new research proposals. The current generation of rising scientists will find it particularly hard to fund their research projects.[29]