The House is expected to pass legislation Tuesday that aims to restructure the National Institutes of Health and would reauthorize the agency for the first time since 1993.
Among its provisions, the draft bill would authorize a 5 percent increase in the NIH budget for fiscal 2007-09 and create a “common fund” that would finance research projects that involve more than one of the NIH’s institutes or centers. It also would create a board to review the NIH’s structural organization and require the agency to establish an electronic system to keep track of research grants and activities.
The bill will be considered under suspension of the rules, which limits debate, bars amendments and requires a two-thirds vote for passage.
The House Energy and Commerce Committee approved the bill, sponsored by panel Chairman Joe L. Barton, a Republican from Texas, last week by a vote of 42-1.
The lone dissenter was Edward J. Markey, D-Mass., who offered two amendments that were rejected. They would have authorized more spending on the institutes and required appropriators to significantly boost the overall NIH budget before diverting any money into the new common fund.
Although Barton said he supported increased spending on NIH, he encouraged the panel to vote against Markey’s amendments. The first amendment, Barton said, would reduce the committee’s influence with appropriators by setting an unrealistic goal for the agency’s funding. The second, he said, would likely have resulted in the common fund never receiving any money.
NIH’s fiscal 2006 budget was approximately $28.3 billion. House appropriators have proposed essentially flat-funding the agency for fiscal 2007 in the spending bill (HR 5647) for the departments of Labor, Health and Human Services and Education.
Although Congress has doubled funding for the NIH in recent years, that isn’t enough, Barton said. “Our job should be to give the NIH the tools it needs to bring accountability and transparency and transformational policies into this, what is closing in on a $30 billion research agency,” he said.
Committee Democrats praised Barton for working with them to develop the bill, but they expressed concerns that the measure would circumvent congressional power to monitor the agency. Democrats also said the measure did not address the issue of racial disparities in health care and was being rushed through the legislative process.
NIH Director Elias A. Zerhouni said Barton’s bill would “preserve such vital authorities as peer review and the pursuit of scientific opportunity through investigator-initiated grants, which have been and should remain the mainstay of our research support mechanisms.”
Among the groups endorsing the bill are the American Cancer Society, the American Heart Association and the Federation of American Societies for Experimental Biology.
