Final NIH budget for 2024 is essentially flat

Congress has given the National Institutes of Health (NIH) a 0.6% increase, to $47.1 billion, in a final 2024 spending bill that lawmakers are expected to approve in time to avert a partial government shutdown this weekend. And several policy directives opposed by researchers have been stripped from the legislation. The tiny, $300 million bump is only one-third of the $920 million increase requested by President Joe Biden, who has promised to sign the $1.2 trillion package covering six federal agencies, and it comes after years of generous increases for NIH. But it was no surprise: Once the president and Congress agreed to tight spending caps in May 2023, the NIH community started to prepare for little if any new funding, says Jennifer Zeitzer, public affairs director at the Federation of American Societies for Experimental Biology (FASEB). And with this fiscal year that began in October 2023 already half over, Zeitzer notes, NIH Director Monica Bertagnolli “and individual [NIH institutes] will have to make some very difficult decisions and on a very quick time frame.” FASEB and other groups say they are grateful Congress was able to settle on any spending bill for NIH’s parent agency, the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS). The alternative would have been a yearlong measure freezing NIH’s budget at the 2023 level. Still, “We are taking a step back,” Mary Woolley, president and CEO of the biomedical research lobbying group Research!America, ...
Source: ScienceNOW - Category: Science Source Type: news