The National Institutes of Health -- the happy recipient of about $10 billion from the recently-passed economic stimulus bill -- is staring down the barrel of another year of flat funding, according to the draft FY2009 budget released yesterday by the House of Representatives.

Image: flickr/borman818

The FY2009 Omnibus Appropriations Act includes a paltry 3% increase to NIH's FY2008 budget. The bill indicates that $30.3 billion will go to the NIH "for lifesaving research into diseases such as Alzheimer's, cancer and diabetes," which only amounts to a $938 million increase above 2008's budget, "so that NIH can capitalize on unprecedented scientific opportunities with almost 10,600 new research grants."

Howard Garrison, a spokesperson for the Federation of American Societies for Experimental Biology (FASEB), told The Scientist that the '09 NIH budget did not come as a surprise. "It's not a healthy increase," Garrison said, "but it is an increase. And it's what we were expecting."

Other government science agencies fare a little better than the NIH in the bill. The Food and Drug Administration would get $2 billion, or $335 million above its 2008 budget, and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention would receive $6.6 billion, $239 million above last year. National Science Foundation funding would be bumped by 7% to 6.9 billion, a reasonable increase given the $3 billion increase it received in the stimulus bill.

The numbers may yet change as the bill gets tossed around the House and Senate floors before a final vote.


Related stories:

Flat funding for NIH in 2009
[23rd February 2009]

How to spend the NIH stimulus
[11th February 2009]