INSIDE (The Beltway) SCOOP –
Gretchen Opper
“The inherent risk taking – the driving
engine for research – that’s the heavier
toll of flat funding. People don’t take as
many risks. You can’t afford to swing the
bat and miss too many times.”
- Jerry Chi-Ping Yin, Ph.D.
University
of Wisconsin-Madison
The sense around town among congressional
staffers and the nonprofit and business
communities is that Congress and the White
House are unlikely to pass the FY2009
appropriations bills on time this year.
Although most people project the possibility
of passing the FY2009 Defense spending bill
in the fall, the general thinking is that
Congress will wait to pass the remaining
appropriations bills until after the next
administration has assumed office in
January. The reason the Defense spending
bill may pass before the election is that
it’s the only bill on which Congress and the
President agree on the need for robust
increases. In fact, the timeline that
appropriations staffers are giving
informally for passing the non-defense
FY2009 appropriations bills extends into
next March. If this timeline holds, sometime
around September, Congress is likely to pass
continuing resolutions to fund all the
non-defense government agencies through
March of next year. Generally, as we’ve
seen, continuing resolutions authorize
government agencies to fund their existing
federal programs at current or reduced
levels either until the resolutions expire
or until Congress passes and the President
signs the remaining appropriations bills.
Although this is not what we want to hear,
patience may open the door for the
possibility of bigger appropriations bills
for our agencies next year.
This week’s
passage of the budget resolution in both
chambers provides some evidence that
Congress doesn’t intend to seek the current
President’s signature on the FY2009
appropriations bills. Here is what we know
so far: 1) President Bush requested a $24
billion increase in domestic discretionary
spending in FY2009, and Congress has just
added $18 billion to his request in its
budget resolutions; 2) the Office of
Management and Budget Director Jim Nussle
has already said that the President will
veto any FY2009 increases above his request;
and 3) Congress does not want a repeat of
last year, with the President vetoing
spending bills.
So what does this mean for
the research community? Given that last
week, the White House formally rejected the
possibility of endorsing further stimulus
measures this year, the last best hope for
additional research funds in FY2008 and
possibly until March of 2009 is the war
supplemental this spring. Members of
Congress have just left for their two week
Easter recess and plan to return on March
31st, at which point, we expect them to take
up the supplemental as well as the FY2009
appropriations bills.
FASEB has been working
with its partners in the Task Force for the
Future of American Innovation, the Coalition
for National Science Funding and the Energy
Sciences Coalition to incorporate emergency
funding for NSF and DOE under the momentum
of the America COMPETES Act into the war
supplemental. Most of what we were hearing
from the Hill is that Members were amenable
if the Administration first made the
request.
We are now hearing that the
Administration wants the war supplemental to
be a “clean bill,” inasmuch as it only wants
supplemental funding for DOD therein. The
final outpost that we can see is the House
Leadership, which has the ability to sway
the outcome. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi
(D-CA) has said she is willing to
incorporate additional science funds into
the supplemental, so we are targeting our
appeals to her and the rest of the House
Leadership and will keep you posted on our
progress.
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Senate HELP Committee Holds Hearing on Biomedical Research Pipeline and Opportunities
The Senate HELP committee held a March 11th
hearing on "The Broken Pipeline: Losing
Opportunities in the Life Sciences" in
coordination with the release of the report, “A
Broken Pipeline? Flat funding of the NIH Puts a
Generation of Science at Risk.” The report,
which a consortium of research universities with
Harvard at the lead produced, is available at
www.BrokenPipeline.org and focuses on the deleterious effects the reduction in NIH funding is having on young scientists. At a press conference earlier that day, Harvard President Drew Gilpin Faust, Ph.D., stated that we are essentially telling junior investigators, who are the “hardest hit” by funding cuts, that “academic medical research may be a dead end and they should explore other career options.”
In addition to Dr. Faust, other witnesses at the HELP hearing, who testified before a standing room only crowd, included Edward Miller, MD, Dean of the Medical Faculty and CEO of Johns Hopkins Medicine; Dana Lewis, a diabetes patient; Jill Rafael-Fortney, Ph.D., Associate Professor at Ohio State University; and Sam Rankin, Ph.D., of the Coalition of National Science Funding. Senators Edward Kennedy (D-MA), Barbara Mikulski (D-MD), Sherrod Brown (D-OH), and Michael Enzi (R-WY) were all passionate in their praise of NIH and its medical accomplishments.
During the question period, Senator Kennedy cited the "extraordinary breakthroughs" that have resulted from doubling the NIH budget and noted that he finds it unbelievable the American people are unaware of them. Calling this the "era of the life sciences," Kennedy talked about the application of basic biological research to other challenges, like global warming and energy. He asked the panel how the Members of the Committee can "awaken the American people and [their] colleagues in the Senate to" the need for NIH funding. Kennedy also discussed the movement toward personalized medicine and how medical research might "profoundly" affect health care costs. He used the delay in the onset of Alzheimer's disease as an example. Finally, Kennedy described China's efforts to emulate NIH and warned that remaining "still" while the world moves ahead is "unrealistic."
For the most part, the witness testimony reiterated the themes of the report, citing the plights of new investigators, impacts on patients, and the need for sustainability. Dr. Rafael-Fortney's short statement was especially powerful, as she described her research discovery of a new target for treating heart disease, which is now "sitting in a freezer" because she's been unsuccessful in obtaining grant funding to move forward. She also described the difficulty in recruiting and retaining postdocs and grad students because of the unpredictability of funding streams. In response to Kennedy’s question, all of the witnesses described the need for scientists and the research community to do a better job of explaining the benefits of basic research. The hearing concluded with a final statement from Senator Kennedy,
who praised NIH and
expressed his hope that Congress can find the political will to help fund it.
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Senate Commerce Committee Convenes Hearing on Basic Research Funding
On Tuesday, the Senate Commerce Committee held a hearing to explore the importance of basic research to U.S. competitiveness. The hearing examined research and development (R&D) budgets at agencies in the Committee’s jurisdiction, including the National Science Foundation (NSF), as well as interagency science programs addressing nanotechnology. Senators John Kerry (D-MA) and Amy Klobuchar (D-MN) presided over the hearing, and Dr. John Marburger, the Director of the Office of Science and Technology Policy, Dr. Arden Bement, the Director of NSF, and Dr. James Turner, the Acting Director of the National Institute of Standards and Technology at the Department of Commerce (NIST), testified.
In his opening remarks, Senator Kerry noted that although the President’s budget for FY2009 adds back a portion of the money the science agencies lost during the final hours of the FY2008 omnibus, it is $142 million short of fulfilling the America COMPETES Act (ACI) FY2009 numbers for those agencies. Senator Kerry provided that if the President’s budget for FY2009 stands, basic funding for research at all the agencies will fall by a total of 5%. Senator Kerry provided that the best strategy for preserving U.S. competitiveness is for the government to invest in long-term strategies, such as R&D.
Dr. Marburger presented the President’s budget request and said it would constitute an overall $850 million increase in basic R&D for NSF, the Department of Energy (DOE) and NIST. Senator Klobuchar noted that the fact that in 2006, for the first time, all of the Nobel Laureates in the sciences (physics, chemistry and physiology or medicine) were American citizens demonstrates the tradition of U.S. scientific leadership and reflects the outcome of the U.S. government’s historical funding of science.
Dr. Marburger agreed that funding science and fulfilling the ACI is an important function of the federal government and pointed out that the President’s budget for FY2009 would provide the science agencies with 85% of the funding the ACI authorizes for FY2009. When Senator Klobuchar asked why the President didn’t request the full amount that the ACI authorizes for those agencies, Dr. Marburger responded that the shortfall is an example of the frequent disparity between the higher funding level the government authorizes and the actual level the government appropriates. Senator Klobuchar expressed her concern that the U.S. is losing ground to China since China is graduating more researchers and engineers.
Senator Kerry noted that NSF seems to have devoted most of its budget to space exploration and expressed concern over its not providing more funding for biology research. Dr. Bement said that the demand for highly-trained STEM graduates is growing by about 5% per year and that he expects the demand to increase now that the baby boomers are preparing to retire. He testified that it is through funding research grants that NSF helps train undergraduate and graduate students as well as young faculty members and explained that a decrease in grant funding will choke off the scientific pipeline.
In response to a question from Senator Kerry regarding the possible inclusion of science funding in the war supplemental this spring, Dr. Bement said that he thinks supplemental funding to try to restore the ACI numbers for science agencies in FY2008 is critically important. Dr. Bement outlined some of the cutbacks the Department of Energy is facing, and Senator Kerry asked Dr. Bement to submit an outline of the adverse impact the lack of funding in the 2008 omnibus is having on NSF. Senator Kerry wondered how quickly NSF would be able to get back up to speed if Congress provides additional funding in the supplemental, and Dr. Bement replied that the process of making up for the shortfall in the 2008 omnibus would be slow since NSF isn’t an agency that performs its own research inasmuch as it distributes 95% of its funding to other entities.
In terms of nanotechnology, Dr. Bement said that the President devoted $1.5 billion in his budget request to the National Nanotechnology Initiative (NNI), and Dr. Marburger pointed out that a lack of funding for the NNI will slow the pace of health research. Dr. Turner provided that NIST has been working closely with the National Institutes of Health and the Food and Drug Administration on nanotechnology to provide rigorous definitions of nanoparticles so that scientists can use them in research.
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