NIH budget cuts for 2006

Below are the planned NIH budget cuts for fiscal year 2006 (source: NIH):

• Congressional budget cut of 1 percent across-the-board cut for all non-emergency discretionary programs for FY 2006 reduced NIH's budget appropriation by $286 million.
• NIH will reduce all non-competing research project grant (RPG) awards by 2.35 percent
• NIH will maintain the average cost of competing RPGs at FY 2005 levels.
• Targeted overall success rate of 19.5 percent, approximately (compared to 22.3 percent in FY 2005).
• Expects to fund more than 38,300 competing and non-competing RPGs in 2006. When compared to FY 2005, this represents a decrease of about 570 RPGs or 1.5 percent.
• Existing grants may incur a percentage reduction in funding allocation, per rules of each individual NIH agency.

For an additional analysis of NIH grant success rates for individual institutes in 2005 and analysis of change since 2004, visit here http://www.epidemiologic.org/2006/10/nih-grant-success-rates-and-change.html.

Also, a list of NIH institutes that report payline percentiles of funded grants is available here (other institutes use a different payline determination method): http://www.epidemiologic.org/pics/NIH-payline.JPG

--> The congressional budget request for the NIH is $28.4 billion in FY 2007, the same as the FY2006 level for the agency.