Republicans leading Congress may be warming to more funding for medical research, and that could make thousands more grants available to scientists every year.
After years of dipping or stagnant budgets, the National Institutes of Health could receive a big infusion of money if House lawmakers reach final agreement on a medical cures bill that would provide the agency with an extra $10 billion over five years.
Representing a roughly 7 percent annual funding boost, the dollars are viewed as a major victory for Democrats, who have made medical research funding one of their chief demands as the cures bill is being negotiated.
The bill is likely to undergo more revisions before it has any chance of passage, with disputes over how to offset the spending being one of the major sticking points. Yet the fact that Republicans, at least for now, have agreed to the funding shows that medical research is rising on their list of priorities.
“As I reflect on this overall bill, one of the things I’m most proud of is the money for the NIH,” said House Energy and Commerce Committee Chairman Fred Upton said at a hearing on the cures bill earlier this month. “We’re all very much on board to increase that funding.”
Upton, who is known as a moderate Republican, championed NIH funding in the 1990s. But there’s also a more apparent openness among fiscal hawks who tend to oppose any legislation that would add to the federal deficit.
Congressional aides say the healthcare plan a group of House conservatives will release next month includes even higher levels of NIH funding than the cures bill. Caitlin Carroll, a spokeswoman for the Republican Study Committee, wouldn’t confirm exact numbers, but said the plan includes “proposals to encourage innovation that will ultimately lower healthcare costs.”
Eric Cantor, who was House majority leader before being ousted in the Virginia primary last year, has recently called for Congress to provide more biomedical research funding without necessarily offsetting it.
And even conservative Reps. Kevin Yoder, R-Kan., and Matt Salmon, R-Ariz., have recently indicated they think pumping more dollars into efforts to cure cancer and other diseases should trump concerns about federal spending.
The recent surge of support has delighted research advocates.
“There’s increased awareness, and I think it is reaching more conservatives who — before this — found it hard to find any government spending they could get their arms around and think it was a good idea,” said Ellie Dehoney, vice president of policy and advocacy at ResearchAmerica.
“I think more of them are saying to themselves, ‘maybe this is part of American values that we can support and we can see it,'” she said.
The National Institutes of Health provides nearly one-fourth of all medical research dollars in the U.S., making it the second largest payer after the industry. Yet largely because of Congress-imposed spending caps, the agency has seen its funding shrink by 22 percent since 2003, if inflation is taken into consideration.
That translates into $6.5 billion the agency would otherwise have at its disposal if not for the cuts — a hole that could be more than filled by the money currently designated in the House cures bill.
NIH also could afford to fund thousands of additional research grants every year. The agency currently awards some 12,000 grants annually to outside scientists to conduct medical research, which takes up about 80 percent of its funding.
That would improve researchers’ probability of getting grant funding. As things stand now, NIH has the resources to fund just one in six qualified grant applications.
The potential funding “provides a sense of stability, it provides an infusion of necessary funding,” said David Pugach, director of federal relations for the American Cancer Society Cancer Action Network.
“The fact that you have a bipartisan group of leaders in Congress who are willing to reverse the trend we’ve seen for more than a decade is quite exciting,” he said.
