Budgets Up at NIH, NCI, and FDA

After a fiscally challenging year, scientific and medical research will feel some budgetary relief with the new federal spending bill signed into law in mid-January by President Obama, totaling $1.1 trillion for fiscal year 2014. Under the new budget, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) will receive $2.552 billion, $166 million more than its post-sequestration 2013 budget, a 7% increase. Funding for the NIH will increase by $1 billion to $29.9 billion, a 3.5% increase, and funding for the National Cancer Institute (NCI) will increase by $140 million to $4.923 billion, a 2.9% increase.

Sequestration, which amounted to a 5% reduction of the NIH FY2013 budget applied evenly across all programs, projects, and activities, had wide-ranging effects. According to NIH Director Francis Collins, MD, PhD, the cuts not only increased competition for new grants, making it harder for new investigators and new ideas to be funded, but also slashed funds from existing grants that were already operating on tight budgets.

For the FDA, the bill goes beyond restoring the budget losses due to sequestration, although a large portion of the increase will cover food-safety activities mandated by a 2011 law. However, other agencies weren't as lucky. The NIH budget falls $714 million short of pre-sequestration funding levels. The NCI budget increase makes up only about half of sequestration losses. In fact, in real dollars, NCI's FY2014 budget falls short of its FY2009 budget of $4.968 billion.

“We should clearly express our appreciation to the Congress for being able to do that much in an incredibly difficult environment,” says Edward J. Benz Jr., MD, president of Dana-Farber Cancer Institute in Boston, MA. “On the other hand, it's a partial make-up. It is not a solution to the fundamental weakening of the research enterprise that has resulted from a long history of dwindling funding that was exacerbated by sequestration.”

At Dana-Farber, sequestration delayed recruitment and indefinitely postponed development of various research centers. “Money that that might have been used for new projects, new ideas, or for recruiting new investigators had to be diverted toward making up for the losses to existing labs,” says Benz.

The sequestration cuts of FY2013 came on top of budget cuts for the NIH and NCI that began in FY2011. Even without taking into account outright budget cuts, the NIH budget had not kept pace with biomedical inflation, an estimated increase in the prices of research equipment and supplies, in a decade. In January 2013, the NIH projected biomedical inflation levels of 2.7% for FY2014 and 2.9% for FY2015.

“Resources are constrained, but there is still a lot of federal and non-federal money being spent on cancer research,” says Benz. “It's incumbent on us to find the best way to use existing funding to make the biggest impact on patients.”

For more news on cancer research, visit Cancer Discovery online at http://CDnews.aacrjournals.org.