.5%. Woohoo! High fives all around!
It is going to be another year of suck for NIH spending. The omnibus spending bill that has been passed by the House and Senate and is expected to be ratified by the President has the following in the matter of NIH funding:
The National Institutes of Health (NIH) would receive a 0.5% increase after high hopes for a slice that would at least keep up with inflation.
...After Bush vetoed legislation that would have given NIH a $1 billion increase, Congress gave it $329 million more, or a 1% raise, to $29.2 billion. Some $300 million is designated for the Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis, and Malaria, however, leaving the biomedical research behemoth essentially at 2007 levels.
Congress made no big changes in how the appropriation will be distributed, although it did single out a few areas for special attention. For example, the National Children's Study--a controversial $3 billion effort to track the health of 100,000 infants from birth to age 21 that NIH says is too expensive to continue--will get an increase of $42 million, to $111 million, next year (Science, 9 February, p. 751). The NIH "common fund," a $496 million pot controlled by the director for cutting-edge research, will get $13 million more. And bricks-and-mortar spending will increase by $38 million, to $119 million.
Congress also formally endorsed open-access publishing, requiring "all investigators funded by the NIH" to submit final peer-reviewed manuscripts to NIH's PubMed Central for release on the Internet "no later than 12 months after the official date of publication."
Well, the open-access publishing amendment is good, but .5% constitutes a decrease in real spending on science research when inflation is included.
The NSF and other agencies didn't fair much better. Read the whole article.
Now I am all for keeping the deficit low. We cannot continue to spend at this rate. However, aside from our proclivity to fight wars, we spend an obscene amount of money on unnecessary and often counterproductive crap. Exhibit A: the farm bill is very likely not only to impoverish the third world but starve them as well due to food price inflation. (It isn't passed yet, and one can dream that the President will veto something I think should be vetoed for once.)
Science, on the other hand, is not in the category of unnecessary and often counterproductive crap. Science pays for itself. Furthermore, which do you think provides a foundation for long-term growth, subsidizing innovation or corporate welfare to large food conglomerates?
What never ceases to astonish me is how science and scientists can have such a good public image, and yet this positive public image does not translate into continued funding. For example, the Science and Engineering Indicators 2002 by the National Science Board found that the public overwhelmingly believes that the benefits of science outweigh its harms:
Also, public confidence in the leadership of science and medicine is superior to nearly every other institution in American life (click to enlarge):
I think that we need to soberly assess why this general public confidence in what we do has failed to translate into consistent science funding. Is it because the public overwhelmingly does not understand what we do? Is it because we haven't associated scientific issues with stories that the public cares about? As a proximate issue, despite the President's objections to increased funding research, it was the Democrats that failed to deliver on this one.
I am happy to hear speculation about this issue, but we most definitely need to confront it. This will simply result in more and more scientists leaving for industry and other non-research aspects of science.
- Log in to post comments
I'd love to see what changes the 2000 decision to elect Bush by the Supreme Court had on the confidence in the court. I also wonder if the denialists about global warming have affected opinions about science.
It's not that the public lacks confidence in science, or that they don't understand science itself; but they have other priorities. Federal funding to farms, or industry bailouts, or other subsidies often affect large numbers of voters directly: even if I don't work on a farm or in a factory, I'm likely to know someone who does. Budget cuts mean tough times and lost jobs.
On the other hand, most voters don't know any scientists or interact with science on a daily basis, and don't really see science as something which needs vigorous defense. Will a (effective) decrease in funding to the NIH directly affect anyone they know? Will their friends risk losing their jobs? Probably not. So while they might not be happy to see science funding decrease, their congressman will come home and tell them that the money is being spent on defense or the farm bill or something else which they perceive as affecting them more directly.
No congressman loses their election because they voted for a cut to science funding, so science will always come behind the issues which feel more important.
Why doesn't public confidence in the leadership of science and medicine translate into more funding? I think your answer, which you allude to in the "framing" link, is reinforced by the (very interesting) graph you present.
Confidence in the institutional leadership for science and medicine may be high, but the importance of our research is communicated to the public largely through the media, and look where they rate on your graph. I applaud researchers who try to communicate directly with the public (cue plug for my own sex-and-epidemiology blog http://www.wisdomofwhores.com), but the truth is that many scientists still regard communication of their work to a wider public as somehow demeaning, certainly secondary to the dubious but somehow still hallowed process of communication-via-peer-review. If we can't be bothered to invest more of our own time and energy communicating with the public, we can't expect the public to invest more in us.
"Will a (effective) decrease in funding to the NIH directly affect anyone they know? Will their friends risk losing their jobs? Probably not."
I think part of the problem is that the people who are indirectly employed by the NIH don't even realize this fact. And they certainly don't communicate this to their friends and neighbors. The point is, that the NIH funds local institutes, meaning your friendly neighborhood University or less commonly obscure "research institute". So people from janitors, to security guards, to admins, to animal caretakers, even some research techs reflexively tell their acquaintances "I work for the U". They don't make it a matter of course thing to say "My job is funded by the NIH" and I find that many of them don't really think this on the usual superficial level.
A related point is that pleas from science advocacy groups like your favorite academic society, and even the university itself oftentimes, to contact the Congressman about X funding bill frequently stop with the most limited population. The PI or at best through the grad student level. It behooves us to act locally to communicate the direct relationship between NIH funding and continued employment all up and down the food chain in my view.
How many times have you included your friendly animal tech or janitor on your email about the funding?
Not good news! Well, at least it wasn't cut!
Dave Briggs :~)
Why is it the Democrats' fault? There are more senators in favor of increasing NIH funding now than there were last year or even back in the 90s. The difference is that Republicans have decided that being contrarian is their only viable strategy. This is not an ideological battle, just a political one. And it's a very weird one. There are certainly at least 15 Republican senators who understand the science funding situation is a bizarre and insane. If they all stood up for what they think is right, there would be no battle; they would pass the bill and override the veto.
As a group, scientists are not good at lobbying, and those employed by the federal government (e.g., at NIH) are not allowed to lobby.