The National Institutes of Health is getting its biggest funding boost in more than a decade as part of a spending bill lawmakers released in the wee hours Wednesday morning.
Under the spending bill to keep federal agencies running through Sept. 30, the NIH will get a $2 billion funding increase. Included in that sum are $200 million for the precision medicine initiative President Obama announced earlier this year, $303 million for efforts to fight antibiotic-resistant bacteria and an extra $350 million for research on Alzheimer’s disease.
The spending increase also includes funding directed toward a project to map the human brain called the BRAIN Initiative and extra funding for programs aimed at reducing opioid use. In total, the spending plan boosts NIH’s funding for this fiscal year to $32 billion.
NIH, which funds billions of dollars in scientific research in its own laboratories and around the country, had suffered under relatively stagnant budgets since its peak level of funding in 2003. Director Francis Collins has said as a result, the agency has lost 22 percent of its purchasing power since then.
While funding for NIH is a relatively bipartisan goal, with lawmakers on both sides of the aisle recently expressing increased appreciation for the research it funds, Congress still hadn’t made it a top priority until now. Collins has spent years trying to convince policymakers to more generously fund the agency.
The spending bill agreed to by Democrats and Republicans includes some other major healthcare-related provisions as well, including two-year delays of the Affordable Care Act’s so-called “Cadillac tax” on high-cost health plans and its tax on medical devices. The legislation also includes a one-year delay of the law’s health insurance tax, or, “HIT” tax.
