Congress Steers NIH Grants to Favored Colleges, Despite Merit-Based Reviews
By JEFFREY BRAINARD
The Chronicle of Higher Education
December 19, 2008
The National Institutes of Health is renowned for its independent peer review of grant applications by disinterested scientists, but the biomedical-research agency is not immune from a subtle variant of Congressionally directed spending—commonly called "pork" or "earmarks"—according to a report published today. It says that members of Congress have helped steer millions of NIH dollars, or about 4 percent of awards to outside researchers, to institutions in their home states.
The study, in the journal Science and the first of its kind, examined grants received by colleges located within the states of lawmakers who sat on the House of Representatives subcommittee overseeing appropriations that the NIH received. It found that public research universities in those states received about 9 percent more NIH money, on average, than did similar institutions with no Congressional representatives on the subcommittee, other factors being equal. Private colleges got no additional money, for reasons unexplained in the analysis, which was done by scholars at the University of California at Berkeley.
The findings are important because the NIH's methods are often called the world's gold standard for allocating government research dollars through merit-based peer review. The agency is also the largest source of money for academic research. Many lawmakers and universities have justified a large expansion of Congressionally directed, noncompetitive research awards, or earmarks, in recent years by saying that at least the NIH's budget remained earmark-free. Earmarks are provisions in appropriations bills that explicitly require agencies to finance specific projects in specific locations.
Senior officials at the NIH flatly disagreed with the paper's findings. Some scholars of Congressional politics and research spending said the study's findings were intriguing but raised unresolved questions. They pointed out that the study relied largely on statistics to infer political influence but was short on case studies and examples of how lawmakers wielded this influence and universities benefited.
"You'd need to go to those institutions and see what's going on" before concluding that political influence was definitely at play, said James D. Savage, a political scientist at the University of Virginia who has studied earmarks.
Indirect Influence on Priorities
The report on the study—by Deepak Hegde, a doctoral student, and David C. Mowery, an economist, at Berkeley's business school—laid out a possible, subtle mechanism for legislators to have steered NIH grants to their home states without resorting to the controversial practice of earmarking.
The lawmakers' likely channel of influence was language in appropriations bills "encouraging" the NIH to spend more on research on dozens of specific diseases and conditions, such as Epidermolysis bullosa, a rare genetic disease of the skin. Legislators may have added such language knowing that universities in their home states had an interest in studying a particular topic. The NIH's leadership, seeking to accommodate those who hold the purse strings for its entire budget, has apparently shifted its spending priorities accordingly in ways that ended up benefiting those institutions, Mr. Hegde wrote in an e-mail to The Chronicle.
Legislators "cleverly work around the peer process to achieve their desired outcomes," he said. The academic scientists who serve as NIH peer reviewers "do not have much leeway in shaping" the NIH's broad spending priorities.
However, Marc Smolonsky, who has directed the agency's Congressional-affairs office for a decade, said, "I am absolutely convinced" that the reported effect of legislative language on NIH grant awards "is an absolute coincidence."
The NIH does consider Congressional priorities for research spending, but there is no evidence that as a result the agency's peer reviewers or administrators award money to researchers in particular states, said Sally J. Rockey, acting deputy director for extramural research.
Ms. Rockey expressed doubts about aspects of the Science study's methodology. "We're going to be looking at it more closely," she said.
The study examined this Congressional language, the membership of appropriations committees, and patterns of NIH grant-making to 8,310 colleges, businesses, and other research institutions from 1984 to 2003.
In reaching their conclusions, Mr. Hegde and Mr. Mowery accounted for various characteristics of institutions that influence how much NIH money they get, such as size and past prowess at landing NIH grants. The institutions represented by appropriations-subcommittee members received more money than the authors would have predicted based on those other factors alone. The study found no such effect in the Senate.
Questions About Research Quality
What is more, the report's authors estimated that representation on the House subcommittee influenced the distribution of $1.7-billion of the $37.4-billion awarded by the NIH to recipients outside the agency from January 2002 to December 2003. To put that in perspective, the $1.7-billion was roughly half the entire sum of all explicit Congressional earmarks for academic research during that period, discovered in Chronicle analyses of spending bills (The Chronicle, March 28). (Congress financed those earmarks through other federal agencies, like the Defense Department.)
Another finding was that the Congressionally influenced NIH spending tended to benefit research institutions that had previously received relatively little money from the agency.
The study does not say that the Congressional preferences led to wasteful spending or bad science. Some critics of earmarking argue that all actions by lawmakers to steer federal research spending toward constituents represents just that. But other observers have called Congressional spending preferences a necessary antidote to back-scratching and group-think among the scientists who review applications for federal research grants.
Mr. Hegde said that he had collected no data about the quality of the Congressionally influenced research financed by the NIH. However, he added, the preponderance of support to institutions with little NIH financing did raise questions about the quality of the research.
Conversely, "you could put a very positive interpretation" on the finding that 4 percent of the NIH's grant awards carry some whiff of pork-barrel spending, says Irwin Feller, a senior visiting scientist at the American Association for the Advancement of Science who has studied earmarks.
"You tell me any other federal research program that would look as good—certainly not in transportation, agriculture," or defense, he said.
There is little empirical research about how the NIH awards billions in research dollars annually, and some scholars called Mr. Hegde's study a good step toward learning more. Mr. Hegde says he and Mr. Mowery plan to do just that, in a subsequent study.
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