Running Out of Time to Make "Noise" at a Congressional Level for 2014 NIH Funding

[Wally]

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.”

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

 

[Wally]

Here is a link to a summary of the Senate's 2014 proposed Labor, Health and Human Services, Education Bill that would fund the NIH for 2014 without a decrease in funds due to sequester cuts.

http://www.appropriations.senate.go....view&id=e4ae4632-5d16-4afc-ad17-74acd7da9aba

NIH: The bill provides $30.955 billion, an increase of $307 million, to fund biomedical research at the 27 Institutes and Centers that comprise NIH. This level will allow NIH to allocate $40 million for the new Brain Research through Application of Innovative Neurotechnologies (BRAIN) Initiative

See also, http://blogs.nature.com/news/2013/07/senate-bill-would-boost-nih-budget-to-31-billion-in-2014.html

The proposed budget, part of a broader spending bill , would increase top-line NIH spending from the current level of $29.15 billion to $30.955 billion, just shy of the $31.1 billion that President Barack Obama requested in April.