Congress has cut the NIH budget for the first time in 36 years.
“The problem is that the cost of doing research rises at about 5-6% per year. That makes this effectively a 5% cut in the [NIH] budget. That means funding 5% fewer applications and making a cut in the support for presently funded projects. For last year’s budget, the “pay line” (cut off for funding) for grants in the NCI (one of the institutes doing the most patient relevant research) was at 10 percent of submitted applications. That means the pay line will likely be less than 10% for the first time ever.
“In comparison, during the Clinton administration the pay lines were at about 25 percent (and in some institutes went to 30% at times). During those years, advances were made in basic cancer research that resulted in the development of targeted cancer therapies such as gleevac, herceptin, targretin and a number of other non-traditional approaches to cancer. I think we can kiss that kind of progress good by at the current funding levels.”
The NIH budget is $28.6 billion. It would take about $1.5 billion to raise it by 5% and prevent cutbacks in current research. The latest tax giveaways to people who make more than you do amount to $95 billion over five years. Tax fraud by the same people costs $340 billion, but we’ve apparently decided to stop enforcing it and focus on the poor instead.
Eating the seed corn.
(via)
Mr Furious
Dumb. And the dumbest part is that it’s only a 0.1 percent cut. If they just held it, they could have avoided any publicity. So, politically dumb as well.
I would argue they should double that budget.
Vladi G
I hear the jury’s still out on science.
Ozymandius
In this post 9/11 world, science just isn’t that important anymore.
Didn’t you hear? The Rapture is just around the corner.
Well maybe not that corner. Just keep turning a few more corners.
tbrosz
This is the NIH budget over the past few years. In constant dollars, which one would assume takes into account the “increased cost of research” to some extent.
Here’s a graph showing the overall research situation, also in constant dollars. Note that the NIH has not exactly been left out in the cold.
Can we keep just a little perspective here?
Source: AAAS
Sojourner
And you’re surprised because…
Haven’t you noticed that science is irrelevant? It’s all about the pursuit of short-term profit.
Hey John: Have you noticed that you rarely criticize Dem policies but manage to bog yourself down with criticizing a few individual players?
tbrosz
Okay, as I suspected, the graphs showed up in preview, but got eaten on posting.
First graph here (PDF).
Second graph here.
Lines
tbrosz: maybe you neglected to read the article, which wouldn’t surprise me, so I’ll try to give you a gentle nudge in the right direction.
Don’t be a dumb-ass! R&D work in biomedical fields increases at a rate of 5-20% per YEAR. Keeping the budget for such research the same from year to year is equivalent to cutting it and therefore cutting the amount of research that the fund is capable of funding. Research goes down, projects die an easily avoidable death.
Tim F.
If you look at the NIH bar on tbrosz’s graph you’ll see that the part corresponding to the NIH (blue) contracted in 2006. My post concerns the NIH budget, so I don’t see the disagreement.
Kirk Spencer
Actually, Tbrosz, the chart is of R&D Expenditures in constant dollars, not budget. The clue (besides the label) is that in 2004 NIH is almost four times larger than DOD. Now that actually raises a point that’s interesting to me.
The budget for last year was over 26 billion. According to the chart almost 25 billion was R&D. Either someone’s fudging, or NIH spends money like it ought to be spent. (Given how much of NIH is records keeping and management, I can’t accept the R&D numbers unchallenged.)
Don
Gosh Tim, don’t you understand that through the magic of taxes and funding cuts that cutting the NIH budget while cutting taxes to people with a lot of money that somehow magic pixie dust will enter the economy and make the NIH have MORE money? I swear, you liberals fail to comprehend the most simple things.
Craig
Actually, we discussed this in my lab this week. The cuts are significant. When a lab gets a grant for say five years they can expect, in general, a 3-5% increase each year due to increasing costs of reseach. Instead, the next year will be cut by 3-5%. These are on grants that labs already have, money that has been handed out already. This means labs are having to cut back on experiments, lets say 10%. What is in that 10%, the more risky experiments, but I can say from being in research for several years that these are often the experiments that move things forward.
More problamatic is getting new grants to keep labs up and running. When the grant approval rate is down to 10% that means that good labs, that have reputations are not getting their grants approved. This means that good science that is reliable is not getting done.
Now where is all of the money going that is packed into the NIH budget if it is not going to labs doing basic science research? It is going to bioterrorism research. Their funding levels have shot up.
Craig
Here is a link to the chart showing the budget:
link
MikeyC
Keep in mind, too, that this is the NIH —medical research that can easily be “sold” to science-ignorant congressment and senators. To REALLY see how basic research is being gutted, check out the budgets for NSF… anything non- “War on terrah” has been squeezed for several years now.
But, those top 1% need their tax cuts, I guess…
jack
Seems strange that there’s all this whining when the dots on the first graph suggest that the NIH REQUESTED less.
And that what they were allotted seems pretty much in line with their request.
Zifnab
I’m all for bio-terrorism research. In an age of chemical bombs, dirty bombs, anthrax letters and other boogiemen, it’s nice to know there’s a science organization out there to protect me.
Except for two things: firstly, can you count on your hands how many times a dirty bomb has been detonated in the United States? How about the world? Anyone? How many times have chemical weapons been used in a terror attack at home or abroad? Last I check, the roadside bombs in Iraq were not being made with streptococous or pnemonia, they’re being made with C4, something I suspect researchers will never find a complete cure for. (although body armor might help, but let’s not go there)
Secondly, there are other more deadly things killing millions of Americans every year. Cancer. STDs. High cholesterol. Malnutrition. Obesity.
It’s comforting to know that while your father or grandfather is suffering from Alzhemiers, the government is making steady progress in defending us all from a rare strain of mutated smallpox.
Sniffles
Good thing something like a flu pandemic isn’t even a remote possibility.
SeesThroughIt
You people just don’t get it. With the tax cuts for the mega-rich, the richest of the rich will decide they don’t need another yacht or to throw a multimillion dollar party or to buy their spoiled-brat children mansions and luxury cars. They’ll think, “You know what I should do? I should fund some scientific research.” Because that totally happens all the time.
tbrosz
I’m sorry, why should that be a given? What’s getting more expensive at 20 percent a year?
Darrell
Because if big daddy federal govt wasn’t doing the research it wouldn’t get done right? NIH to a large extent is a taxpayer funded subsidy to big pharma and biotech industries, doing research paid for by taxpayers which otherwise would be done by the pharma and biotech companies anyway
Regarding the tax “giveaways” (don’tcha love how leftists call keeping more of your money you earned “giveaways”) there is not a linear dollar-for-dollar correllation between tax cuts and reduction in govt revenues. You see, private citizens investing and spending their own money for some unknown reason are more efficient than politicians spending other people’s money. Imagine that.
As a result, much of the tax ‘giveaways’ come back in the form of increased tax revenues as people use their money to invest and make more for themselves. Dishonest leftists claim that $100 million or whatever amount of tax cuts will amount to $100 million less in tax revenues. Too bad the facts say otherwise
Pooh
Darrell, whenever you use the word “facts” my eyelid starts twitching.
SeesThroughIt
Remember, it’s not facts, it’s truthiness.
Darrell
Facts suck, huh? Those ‘tax cuts for the rich’ really choked off tax revenues, didn’t they?
Ben
NIH who’s management now is entirely appointies of this Administration?
This is BS. A large portion of NIH’s budget goes to research performed at public and private universities.
Cyrus
I’ve heard that before, and it’s always made me wonder, at what point does it stop? I mean, I suppose it’s possible that decreasing the tax on a certain good or income source from 20% to 19% would result in a net increase, but I’m damn sure that decreasing the tax from from 1% to 0% would not. So what’s the optimal rate of taxation? Is it 1%? (Or .5%, or .25%…)
Or maybe, is it just possible that tax cuts have their effect due to the fact that the [tiny] increase of money in peoples’ bank accounts results in investment that promptly gets tied up in luxury items that result in relatively little economic growth or development, thereby making the effect strictly temporary?
I have exactly zero evidence of that. But then, I’ve never seen any evidence that tax cuts bring in more revenue either. What a funny coincidence.
Seconded.
Richard Bottoms
So vote Democrat next time and stop whining. You vote Republican and this is what you get.
Pooh
Explain how supply-side economics increase government revenues Darrell. Go. Pay specific attention to why targeting tax cuts at those people with the lowest marginal propensity to spend is a good for the economy.
Or just paper us with Laffer-curve links.
Lines
R&D costs increase at a rate slightly above inflation because of technology. 5% to 20% is not unheard of, and is a typical budget awareness value in high tech industries.
Cyrus
… facts from the Treasury department. Forgive me if I don’t take the word of someone whose boss was appointed by Bush personally.
How about the GAO? Or the Economist magazine? Or a university with a respected Economics or Political Science department? Or, hell, the Cato Institute or anyone else who does not work for a man with personal self-interest in low taxes who has staked a big part of his reputation and political coalition on them, and demonstrated an unprecedented or at least unusual tendency to secrecy and unaccountability in government? I mean, can even you see how the Treasury Department might, just might, fail to be strictly impartial?
Darrell
And the fruits of that university research fall under the public domain to be exploited by big pharma and bio companies. So explain for us then how it’s suchy “BS” that NIH is to a large extent a taxpayer funded subsidy to big pharma and bio companies.. that ‘logic’ I would like to hear
Darrell
You know you’re a leftist moonbat when…
Ben
the “fruits of that unviersity research” does not fall under the public domain. It is owned by the Univeristy. It is then sold to pharm/bio/tech companies. Or at least that’s how it used to work. Due to lack of funding from the Federal Government many universities sign deals with large pharma companies in order to maintain their funding levels. So for example: Novartis, a swiss company, paid Berkeley a large sum of money in order to fund basic reasearch.. They now get first rights to negotiate licenses on a large percentage of their discoveries. So instead of going to the highest bidder they are sold to Novartis at a cut rate. So in short decreasing the amount of money the federal government spends on science research actually increases University dependance on big multinational companies. It’s nice that all this research is going to a big multinational Swiss based company too. There are so many problems with the scenario. It’s just rediculous.
Darrell
If the research was funded by a federal grant, which is how NIH operates, than the research from that federal grant falls under the public domain. Pharma companies do contract out with universities for research, but that is a separate issue from NIH grants in most cases
Google NIH grants and see for yourself. Taxpayer funded research which is used by big pharma and bio industries
Ben
You’re about 20 years behind. The 1980 Bayh-Dole Act transfered ownership of NIH funded patents to the owner of the grant (Universities and Pharma companies). NIH funded patents haven’t been in the public domain since then. It’s done with the intention of more rapidly moving research into the market.
Darrell
The university has rights to the IP, but the government gets a non-exclusive license. NIH exercises its right through the government’s license to make such research done under contract and grant publicly available. Furthermore, NIH does not typically renew grants unless the recipient publishes the results.
Again, taxpayer funds used in NIH grants are used and exploited by pharma companies for profit. I have no problem with the profit part, but if pharm and biotech companies want such research, they should pay for it on their own dime
Cyrus
when… Darrell doesn’t bother providing evidence for his case?
Seriously. If the topic was NAFTA and I cited a Clinton appointee, would you take my word for it? Somehow I doubt it. And it’s not like we’re talking about a carefully-sourced and methodical study or report by a disinterested group here, it’s a graph with revenues on the Y axis, time in years on the X axis, and a line with a positive slope. Don’t get me wrong, I’m sure that such a methodical study or report exists, but that’s not what you’re showing us.
docG
From NIH web site:
Note second paragraph, please. Having been a principal investigator of a federal grant, and attending the prerequisite federal meetings, and filled out enough compliance forms to choke a horse, perhaps I have some credibility in telling our friend Darrell that when you Google something you don’t have content knowledge in, its very easy to be wrong.
Darrell
thanks for bringing up the Bayh-Dole act. Interesting. It seems that act made things even worse than I previously imagined in that the NIH is not obligated to make all research conducted with taxpayer money under the public domain. Worse. According to this article, the NIH has the right in some circumstances, to give “private industry exclusive licensing rights to any promising discoveries arising from federally funded research”. Gotta give kudos to Al Gore for fighting it
Ironically, it seems the left on this site is deploring any cuts to this program, a program which is largely a subsidy to fat cat pharma being subsidized by taxpayers.. spinning it as some kind of attack on the poor
Darrell
Well, I was wrong in the detail that not ‘all’ of NIH research goes to the public domain, but my larger point, which I stated in my very first post was absolutely correct, that NIH to a large extent is a taxpayer funded subsidy to big pharma and biotech industries
TM Lutas
Research funding (from the link in the post) is up 45% since President Bush took office. Even accounting for higher expenses we’re doing more research today than we were when those mean anti-science Republicans took office. But I’m not so sure that we should just roll over on treating higher yearly expenses as a constant.
Cost increases should be a variable factor. Salaries don’t have to constantly go up. Technology tends to to get cheaper, not more expensive over time, driving costs down, not up in the larger economy. A great deal of lab equipment doesn’t have to be thrown away at the end of its useful life. The only circumstance I can think of to justify this attitude of cost increase as vendor birthright is that people expect more money to be around and just raise their prices. It’s like the budgets keep going up… oh wait, they do.
Seed corn, like everything else, has to be rationed out. You can set aside too much. No matter how much you do set aside there’s going to be research that will have to be done in future years. When you have 36 years of constant increases, there’s going to be fat built into the system. There is in *every* government system. Properly done, putting the occasional brakes on is going to be salutory for any program. In my opinion, this is a light tap on the brakes.
Tim F.
TM Lutas,
Free-market theorzing only works when you have a basic understanding of the system that you’re talking about.
Your post shows a basic misunderstanding of how science works. Technology only gets cheaper when you look at a single generation of a single product over time. The PC hasn’t gotten any cheaper even though it has been on the market for decades. Think about why that is.
Similarly, science done today requires far more technology than science done fifteen years ago, but because the technology is cheaper the cost of doing science goes up only by 5%. Scientists do things in an afternoon that was prohibitively expensive and took a month fifteen years ago. That doesn’t mean that one paper now takes an afternoon, it means that one paper is expected to contain a crapload more technological ‘work’ than was the case fifteen years ago.
You also misunderstand how funding is allocated. When budgets tighten the least deserving work rarely gets ejected first. Protected work that is very hard to de-fund includes most researchers with tenure, anybody who sits on a grant committee, the good friends of those who sit on grant committees and the proteges of those people.
The people who get left out, meaning de-funded first, are the young researchers working on their first grant, who haven’t yet earned tenure and haven’t yet built a network of ‘old boys’ who’ll watch their back. It’s these people, who are often doing the most exciting and innovative work, who get ejected first when research budgets shrink. If the going gets hard enough they simply leave science and get scooped up by places like Big Pharma, or leave the country. That’s called a ‘brain drain. Down the road departments looking for good professors to fill vacancies have a smaller and weaker pool of candidates from which to choose. When you keep the old guard on life support at the expense of the new generation, it’s the very definition of eating the seed corn.
Broken
Darrel says:
Facts suck, huh? Those ‘tax cuts for the rich’ really choked off tax revenues, didn’t they?
*
Your graph includes all revenues including Social Security. Actual income tax revenue in 2005 was less than in 2000, ($1.1 trillion vs $1.2). Check the OMB website: http://www.whitehouse.gov/omb/budget/fy2005/
So, the facts don’t support your theory that cutting taxes on the wealthy increases tax revenue.
Darrell
Broken, your link is to a general site on budget, not tax revenues. Do you have anything else more specific? because I see nothing in that link which says anything about tax revenue figures as you claim.
Darrell
Except that the ‘brain drain’ is draining out of Europe into the US. And high paying Pharma jobs here are not a drain, but a boon.
Oh, and you’re wrong about PC prices not being lower now than they were 10 years ago. Back then, Larry Ellison was telling us about the need for an internet-only PC with no operating so that the price point could be dropped to $500. Now you can get a new PC, complete with monitor and OS for under $400… and dropping.
tbrosz
Tim F:
I think the point I was trying to make is that the rate of growth of the NIH over the past few years has far exceeded the rate of inflation. I’m well aware that there will never be enough funding to make all the researchers happy, but acting like this recent slowdown is some drastic slashing of the system after that huge rate of growth is kind of silly.
We’re looking at almost 28 billion dollars in 2006, compared to something around 15 billion in 1998. How can you talk about a “brain drain” when there are obviously many more scientists in the NIH system now than there were only eight years ago? It’s also obvious that the NIH has taken the lion’s share of the Federal R&D funding recently, and maybe it’s time to share the wealth a bit. The threat of “brain drain” could apply to those other areas, too.
Broken
Darrell, load the Historical Tables PDF from the OMB site. For more detail on 2005, check page 212 of the Analytical Perspectives PDF.
Tim F.
I am well aware of the direction that the global brain drain has run. In fact, I married it. It’s a sad story, though not sad for us, that Europe has suffered exactly the problem that I describe by training good minds and then starving them for funds. The last thing that I want to do is to follow their example.
Jobs that go to ‘Big Pharma,’ to use your term, are most definitely lost to science. They become an arm of business, which is another animal entirely. People who work for public money are obliged to share their work publicly. People who work for Pharma are obligated to share nothing and usually don’t. And once a good researcher has built the sort of lifestyle that an industry paycheck can offer, the chances of taking an academic paycut are tiny.
That is largely correct, with the caveats that I described above. Indexing for inflation and the increasing cost of research, this year’s ‘slowdown’ will mean cuts across the board, and disproportionate cuts to vulnerable young researchers.
Another problem is that existing funds have been dramatically tilted towards bioterrorism, which is a fine idea in principle but significantly increases the impact of cuts on the rest of science. The growth that you see between 1998 and 2005 has the same caveat; after you take out the chunk due to inflation the rest is largely defense and terrorism-related expenditures.
tzs
As someone who sells very cutting-edge scientific instrumentation to researchers, I can tell you stuff like this has an effect not just on researchers, but also on companies like mine. Cutting NSF and NIH budgets like this has one message: this stuff is not a priority for the US.
Guess what we see? The young researchers getting discouraged and quitting science, or moving to locations that do offer them $$$. Guess what we also see? We’re selling more of our stuff to countries like China and Korea.
Eating one’s seed corn, indeed. DUMB.
Darrell
Broken, I downloaded the pdf file you suggested. You are correct that Social security inflated the numbers of the treasury graph I posted, but so did big increases in corporate income tax payments.. Corporations, after the tax cuts ‘for the rich’, paid more in taxes in 2005 than they did in 2000 back in the internet bubble boom days (Section 2 of the pdf file). And the pdf file you pointed me to just had ‘estimates’ for 2004 and 2005, and as has been reported, those earlier estimates were exceeded
Bottom line is that tax revenues have been increasing even with tax cuts, even if you exclude SS revenue.
Darrell
So once a researcher goes to work for a non-govt Pharma or Biotech firm, they are ‘lost’ to science? Oh brother. So the only scientific advancement is made through govt funded research and academia, right? C’mon
Tim F.
You conflate scientific advancement and the advancement of a particular company. Companies generally don’t share their work. They don’t have to, and it’s bad for business. Academic research operates on an entirely different level. You are obligated to share your work, and your advancement depends on sharing your work. Needless to say (I hope), ‘science’ only advances when people share their results; without collectivity you have dozens of people making the same mistakes, being wrong and not being corrected, and working with an extremely narrow focus with respect to the meaning of their work. This dysfunctional sort of ‘community,’ which is the case with Pharma, keeps secrets very well but advances in a general sense extremely poorly.
If you can’t or won’t make the distinction between one type of research and the other then you won’t have a very good grasp of how science operates in general.
tbrosz
Just as another point of reference, in 2004 the American pharmaceutical industry spent almost $50 billion on R&D compared to the entire NIH budget of $28 billion.
Source here. Big PDF file–sorry.
Ken Hahn
Other than military spending, is there or has there even been a program you’re willing to cut? Or even reduce the rate of growth? Is there anything you believe isn’t within the scope of government?
Simply put, we could tax everyone who made more than the average income at 100% and confiscate the total net worth of everyone worth more than $1,000,000 and there still wouldn’t be enough for “liberals” to spend. You’d also pack the tax code with exceptions for your friends in academia and NGOs, and for campaign contibutions to Democrats, lefty foundations and labor unions. And you’d still be crying about the lack of funds.
There will never be enough money for you.
Broken
Darrell said:
“Broken, I downloaded the pdf file you suggested. You are correct that Social security inflated the numbers of the treasury graph I posted, but so did big increases in corporate income tax payments.. Corporations, after the tax cuts ‘for the rich’, paid more in taxes in 2005 than they did in 2000 back in the internet bubble boom days (Section 2 of the pdf file). And the pdf file you pointed me to just had ‘estimates’ for 2004 and 2005, and as has been reported, those earlier estimates were exceeded
Bottom line is that tax revenues have been increasing even with tax cuts, even if you exclude SS revenue.”
Nope. The OMB figures of $1.1 trillion for 2005 and the $1.2 trillion for 2000 includes both corporate and individual income taxes. Therefore, the Bush income tax cuts have not produced higher tax revenues as you claimed, despite a larger economy.
Faux News
Perhaps Judge Alito’s wife was really crying about the NIH budget cuts! Has anyone thought of that angle yet?
searp
The budget is just a huge patronage reward-bag, didn’t you know that? You want to really lose your lunch in a hurry, take a close look at the defense budget.
Talk about vote-buying.
scs
Tax cuts and the economy is like trying to figure out a weather system. There are so many variables, even the most advanced super computers of today can’t figure it out. But I’ll try to give it a stab.
Tax cuts can lead to revenue increases greater than the amount expected to be lost through the tax cuts. I think that is the point. Not that tax cuts will necessarily lead to greater amounts coming in than is lost, although it could. Also tax cuts can lead to greater revenue increases than the lower amount predicted from a slowing economy. In other words, it can stimulate a slowing economy.
This growth in tax revenues from tax cuts can be accomplished in many ways. Tax cuts don’t usually touch the military or social security which is te larger part of the budget. Instead they probably touch things like welfare, research, and payouts to various government bureaucracies. These payouts are not very directly stimulating to the economy as they are not really increasing business and trade in the country.
Lowering the taxes, for the wealthy say, will mean that the rich will have more money to spend on luxury goods which increase highpaying jobs for the people who make these goods. But more importantly, I believe tax cuts for the rich increase the stock market. Most rich people have pretty much most of the goods they want to buy anyway – a small tax cut won’t make or break them. The net effect of a tax cut will be for the rich to put more money in the stock market (or the banks), which is where they store most of their money anyway. As more money is available in banks and the stock market, this will in turn stimulate business investment, and in turn stimulate jobs, and thus tax revenues. It is all one big chain.
However, this is all a balancing act, and there are limits to the amount of benefits that tax cuts will bring in. The trick is to find and adjust for this balance. Anyway, that is how I see it, feel free to revise.