Volume 21: No. 4, April 2007

Outlook for Fiscal Year 2008 Appropriations
by Karen Studwell

While Congress spent most of April out of session for a long Easter recess, Science Government Relations staff continued to work independently and in broader coalitions to educate Congress and key congressional staff about important science funding issues.

With the House under Democratic leadership, there is renewed interest in restoring recent cuts to important research, health, and education programs. As the new chair of both the full House Appropriations Committee and the Subcommittee on Labor, Health and Human Services and Education, David Obey (D-WS) will play a critical role in making these decisions and has expressed his support for a broad range of health and research programs.

In recent meetings with Chairman Obeys committee staff, as well as in congressional testimony, APA has continued to push for a 6.7 percent increase for the National Institutes of Health and increases for other health programs. On March 30, 2007, APA submitted its testimony citing concern over falling success rates at NIH (now below 20 percent in many institutes). APAs testimony also raised concern about research training and the need to maintain programs to support young and minority investigators who are most vulnerable in the current funding climate.

Other House members have shown their support by signing a Congressional "Dear Colleague" letter to support 6.7 percent increases for NIH for the next three years, which they state is necessary to "restore the funding lost to NIH since 2003 and preserve our investment in biomedical research." The letter currently has 143 Congressional signatures.

However, before Congress gets started on individual appropriations bills, it has to complete its work on the concurrent Budget Resolution, which limits how much money the appropriations committees can allocate to discretionary programs. Currently, the House budget resolution provides approximately $22 billion more than the president requested and nearly $6 billion more than the Senate budget resolution. We expect the final budget resolution to emerge from conference within the next week.

One specific issue that has been of concern to individual investigators supported by the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development (NICHD) is the funding for the National Childrens Study, which seeks to enroll a cohort of 100,000 children from before birth to age 21 to look at the environmental influences on child health and development. The Bush Administration proposed to stop the study in its FY 2007 and FY 2008 budget requests only to have Congress provide a new funding stream for the NCS through the Office of the NIH Director. At a congressional hearing in March, Chairman Obey asked NIH Director Elias Zerhouni about the NIHs lack of support for the NCS, and Zerhouni explained that the decision was based on budget priorities and that funding the NCS would drastically reduce NICHDs ability to fund other research. In response, Obey indicated that Congress would again provide additional funds to NIH for the NCS. As co-chair of the Friends of NICHD, APAs Karen Studwell submitted the coalitions congressional testimony to the House in late March, which called for $111 million for the NCS.

Some of the additional goals advocated in APAs Labor-HHS-Education testimony were increases in suicide prevention programs at the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration and Centers for Disease Control and Prevention; increases in the Graduate Psychology Education program in the Health Resources and Services Administration that trains psychologists to work in integrated care settings with rural and under-served populations; and expansion of Child Trauma treatment and prevention programs.

Chairman Obey is pushing to have all appropriations bills, including the Labor-HHS-Education bill, completed in the House by the July 4th congressional recess.