Here we go again. The House last week approved legislation suspending the debt ceiling for at least four months.
But it’s only a stop-gap measure on the debt ceiling crisis until May 18.
Meanwhile, on March 1, we hit the postponed “fiscal cliff” again, at which time, should the Congress and Obama Administration not agree upon a way forward on the federal budget, sequestration will be implemented.
While a fun word to say, in application sequestration would result in significant budget cuts to federal programs.
Should sequestration occur, the National Institutes of Health (NIH) would be hit with an 8 percent cut. In 2012, Massachusetts research organizations received more than $2.4 billion in NIH funding. Sequestration could reduce NIH funding to Massachusetts by as much at $200 million.
In 2011, United for Medical Research, an organization that supports federal NIH research, using a widely accepted economic activity multiplier, calculated that NIH funding supports about 33,000 jobs in Massachusetts. The NIH itself estimates that every $1 of NIH funding generates $2.21 in local economic activity. Using these models, the impact of NIH cuts due to sequestration would be approximately 2,644 fewer jobs and $442 million in less economic activity in Massachusetts.
For those skeptical about the multiplier effect, just visit a parking garage in the Longwood Medical Area of Boston or Kendall Square in Cambridge. The first vehicles in every day and the first to leave in the afternoon are the pick-up trucks of those in the trades who service the research laboratories. These workers are examples of those not directly in biomedical research, but who are certainly direct beneficiaries of that multiplier effect.
Massachusetts organizations received 5,105 NIH competitive grants last year, second only to California. Massachusetts is home to the top five NIH-funded independent research hospitals and New England is home to nine of the top 20 in the world. Massachusetts universities received $898 million in NIH funding, with Harvard, the University of Massachusetts and Boston University leading the way. Massachusetts is home to four of the top 10 NIH-funded principal investigators in the nation – Eric Lander and Stuart Schreiber of The Broad Institute; Daniel Kuritzkes of Brigham & Women’s and Lee Nadler of Dana-Farber.
If the NIH should sneeze, Massachusetts will catch a cold.
Funding Declines
Beyond sequestration, NIH faces other challenges.
Since an infusion of federal stimulus funding in 2009, NIH funding has declined annually. When adjusted for inflation, NIH funding has decreased ever since reaching a peak in 2003. The number of research grants awarded has declined since 2004. In recent months, NIH has been criticized alternately by some scientists as being too incremental and conservative in the award of research dollars and some conservative groups for funding studies they deem controversial.
In the mid-1980s, NIH faced similar issues. It was the era of the Gramm-Rudman Act, which imposed mandatory sequesters when the deficit exceeded budget targets. It was also an era in which some of the prevailing thought was that the private sector should fund biomedical research, not the federal government.
Ultimately, champions of NIH emerged in Congress, such as U.S. Rep. Silvio Conte, a Massachusetts Republican; Sen. Lowell Weicker of Connecticut, also a Republican; and Democratic Rep. William Natcher of Kentucky, as well as Sen. Edward M. Kennedy. From 1983 to 1993, NIH’s budget doubled.
Industry today provides about 65 percent of research funding in the nation. Rather than displace such funding, the National Bureau of Economic Research concludes that every $1 of NIH research funding increases private medical research by 32 cents.
NIH funds have led to breakthroughs in medical research too numerous to note, from the mapping of the human genome to research on monoclonal antibodies that has led to more than 20 medical therapies for afflictions ranging from arthritis to lymphoma. The largest funder of biomedical research globally, the NIH has helped fund the work of 135 Nobel Prize-winners.
Over the past 30 years, the U.S. has become the biomedical research capital of the world and Massachusetts is arguably the premier biomedical research cluster in the world. Federal funding of basic research through the NIH was a major factor in these achievements. As the next round of cliff talks arrives, one can only hope that some measure of the bipartisanship of the 1980s reemerges and NIH funding is sustained.
Peter Abair is director of economic development and global affairs at the Massachusetts Biotechnology Council (MassBio).
