The White House officially released its FY 2006 Budget in early February, which contains the President’s recommended funding levels for administrative departments and agencies.  This document often plays an influential role in the congressional budget and appropriations process because the President has the final say in whether or not to veto or sign any bill. 

This year’s funding request for the National Institutes of Health is about $28.8 billion, which translates into a percentage increase of less than 1%.  Because this amount is well below the annual rate of inflation (typically 3 to 5%), many in the health and research communities view this as a cut in funding. 

Bradie Metheny recently examined these numbers more closely in a February 25^th Washington Fax piece entitled “NIH Priority Initiative Choices Based On Scientific Opportunity; RPGs Remain HIgh Priority.”

Some highlights from the article include the fact that more than a third of the proposed increases for FY 2006 would go to new and competing continuation basic research project grants (RPGs), which includes a proposed $52 million boost in keystone investigator-initiated R01s.  However, under the plan, the NIH would not be able to cover the 3.5% inflation factor for biomedical research and the NIH would not pay the cost of inflation on non-competing continuation grants.

The article concludes by noting that the: “NIH already has posted a planned drop in the total number of research project grants it will support. The budget proposal shows a decrease of 411 RPGs: the number of non-competing continuation grants in FY 2005 was 27,750, but in FY 2006 the estimate is for 27,092.”

The amount recommended for the National Cancer Institute as part of the overall NIH budget was just over $4.8 billion – virtually unchanged for this year’s funding levels. 

In a February 8^th Wall Street Journal article by Bernard Wysocki, Jr. entitled “R&D Will Get More Money – Barely,” Friends’ Chair Dr. Ellen Sigal shared her concern that “flat funding would slow work in genomics, nanotechnologies and other research fields in the fight against cancer.”

Also in the article, Dr. William Dalton, CEO of the H. Lee Moffitt Cancer Center shares his concern that the flattening of the budget will mean that younger researchers are less likely to get their proposals approved: "The more established investigators will continue to be successful. The young people coming into the field are the ones who suffer from tight budgets.”

Next month, the FOCR newsletter will explore this number in more depth and its implications for the NCI.