NACA meeting: September 24-25, 2008

Status of FY 2008, 2008, and 2010 Budgets for NIA

FY 2008
The National Institute on Aging (NIA) is currently preparing to close out FY 2008. This summer, NIA proposed reprogramming to reallocate funds from non-competing Research Project Grants (RPGs), Other Research, and Research Training to Competing RPGs in order to extend our payline and support the target level of new investigators.

On June 30, 2008, the President signed into law H.R. 2642, the Supplemental Appropriations Act, 2008. This Act provided an additional $150 million to NIH. The NIA portion was $5.57 million. An amount of $1.792 million was transferred from NIA to the National Human Genome Research Institute (NHGRI) for the Genes, Environment and Health Initiative (GEI) to support research that will lead to the understanding of genetic contributions and gene-environment interactions in common disease. As a result of these actions, NIA’s revised FY 2008 enacted level is $1,051.038 million, an increase of $3.778 million or 3.6 percent above FY 2007.

On July 16, Senator Arlen Specter (R-PA) introduced for himself and Senator Tom Harkin (D-IA) S. 3272, a bill to make emergency supplemental appropriations for the National Institutes of Health for the fiscal year ending September 30, 2008. This supplemental would provide $5.2 billion for NIH, $4.0 billion of which would be appropriated to the Office of the Director, NIH, “which shall be transferred to the Institutes and Centers of the National Institutes of Health to be used to support additional scientific research” and $1.2 billion would be for the National Cancer Institute (NCI) to support scientific research. No part of these funds would be available beyond the current fiscal year.

In FY 2008, the NIA currently estimates support of 1,588 RPGs, including 450 new and competing projects. NIA is presently supporting competing RPGs up to the 14.2 percentile. Support levels for other funding mechanisms include 74 research centers for $83.663 million; 260 other research grants, including 229 research career awards, for a total of $28.895 million; 564 full-time training positions for $23.773 million, and a total of $68.406 million for research and development contracts.

FY 2009
On July 16, the Senate Committee on Appropriations held a hearing on the NIH FY 2009 budget in which Dr. Elias Zerhouni, Director, NIH, was accompanied by the Directors of NCI, the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID), the National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute (NHLBI) and NHGRI. This hearing marked a departure from those of the past several years; at this hearing NIH witnesses were encouraged to offer to the Subcommittee a vision of what the future for NIH should look like from both a science and a budgetary standpoint. Plans for future budget needs were described and Senators Harkin and Specter announced that they were planning to introduce a $5.2 billion supplemental bill for NIH immediately following the hearing. NIH witnesses were encouraged to discuss what large scale projects would be undertaken if there were large increases in funding, and witnesses responded by describing the unprecedented opportunities and possibilities today, based on investments of the past.

It is expected that NIH will operate under a Continuing Resolution for FY 2009 until after the elections or a new President takes office.

FY 2010

Preliminary work on the budget for FY 2010 has begun using the FY 2009 President’s budget request as the base. After intermediate stages of review, the President’s budget request for FY 2010 will be presented to Congress in February 2009, at which time it will become available to the public.

A table showing the NIA FY 2007, 2008, and 2009 funding levels by budget mechanism is included below. Please note that the FY 2008 column reflects the Supplemental funding and the GEI transfer; however, it does not reflect the proposed NIA reprogramming.