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President Signs Appropriations Bill
On December 9, President Bush signed the Omnibus Appropriations Bill for fiscal year 2005. The FY 2005 amount for NCI is $4.866 billion, $141 million above the FY2004 obligations. However, one of the provisions within the Act is a 0.8 percent across-the-board reduction. The Labor/HHS portion of the bill is also subject to an $18 million reduction for administrative costs. Hence, the initial increase identified for NCI will be decreased. In addition, there are nondiscretionary obligations of the Institute that include the NIH policy to fund noncompeting Research Project Grants with an average 3 percent committed Cost-of-Living-Adjustment (COLA), a requirement for NCI to contribute to the NIH Roadmap Initiatives, and the mandated federal salary adjustment.
Therefore, to be able to continue our investments in strategic opportunities for the National Cancer Program, NCI leadership wants to discuss with the NCI community leadership the implication of budget allocations, including redeployment of existing resources to fund new opportunities. This will be discussed with the National Cancer Advisory Board, the Board of Scientific Advisors, the Board of Scientific Counselors, and the Advisory Committee to the Director at a retreat on January 11, 2005.
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With our 2-week holiday break upon us, the NCI Cancer Bulletin staff would like to extend our sincere thanks for your support and interest over the first year of publication. These past 12 months have been interesting, exciting, and educational for us as we have worked to fulfill our goal of providing useful and timely information about cancer, cancer research, and NCI activities to the widest possible audience.
We've been encouraged by the robust expansion of our subscriber list from about 8,000 for the first issue to more than 17,000 this month, and the positive results of our reader survey, which showed that 98 percent of respondents thought the NCI Cancer Bulletin was informative or somewhat informative. Of course, we're always searching for ways to make this publication even more appealing and useful. Throughout the year, our readers - both inside and outside NCI - have provided feedback on ways to improve the newsletter. Based on that feedback, here are a few of the changes we will be implementing for 2005:
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An HTML version of the NCI Cancer Bulletin to accompany the weekly PDF version
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A searchable database of past NCI Cancer Bulletin articles
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A more streamlined approach to the Funding Opportunities and Upcoming Meetings columns
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Longer and more in-depth articles on topics about vital cancer research being conducted across the country and around the world
As always, we welcome advice and comments from our readers, which can be sent via e-mail to ncicancerbulletin@mail.nih.gov. Thank you again for your support in 2004. We're looking forward to another year of bringing you the latest news on cancer and research, and hope that you'll continue to read along each week.
NCI Cancer Bulletin staff
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