A little over a year ago, I wrote a piece at The Next Hurrah called "So what's wrong with doubling the NSF budget anyway?," where I argued that plans to double the National Science Foundation's budget through Bush's American Competitiveness Initiative made for bad policy.
I gave three reasons: first, I thought it was political posturing with no action behind it; second, I thought it was a "pro-science" front used to cover up lack of funding for NIH; and third, I said that Clinton's NIH budget doubling had shown that rapid, unsustainable funding bursts create boom-and-bust cycles that, in the long run, hurt science, and that sound policy calls for slow, steady, sustainable growth.
That last item bears repeating and, fortunately, a column on Science magazine's web site last week makes the point again for me:
Between 1998 and 2003, the budget of the National Institutes of Health (NIH) rose from $13 billion to more than $27 billion in a plan known as "the doubling." Now that the tsunami of cash has receded, many life scientists--especially those in the early phase of their careers--have found conditions no better, and in some ways worse, than before the process began. [...]
The NIH doubling did do a lot of good, providing billions of dollars for basic and clinical research and establishing a new, much higher baseline for funding. Still, "both the way Congress has expanded the NIH budget and the way NIH has made use of its new funds offer important cautionary lessons," writes Yuval Levin, a former associate director of the White House Domestic Policy Council, in an article in The New Atlantis. He writes that the infusion of money was "far too rapid, and not adequately tied to structural reforms that might enable NIH to best make use of its growing resources." Fifteen percent hikes for each of 5 years "built expectations and momentum that set the agency up for disappointment when the doubling was done," he writes.
The Science column links to a study by Paula Stephan, an economist at Georgia State University (PDF of PowerPoint slides) that puts some numbers on exactly how the doubling affected young scientists. I'll post some of the key charts below, but the bottom line is essentially what I'd noticed as I watch post-docs go out looking for jobs and young faculty starting up their labs. The NIH budget doubled for five years, then was cut or held flat for five years. The first phase created a lot of new lab space that was filled by scientists who now can't get grant money to fund their young labs. We're left with a decade's worth of graduate students and post-docs who see academic science as an unstable career path.
The solution? Congress should put aside politically symbolic budget doublings and pass legislation that commits to a couple of decades of slow, steady, sustainable increases in NIH funding at levels slightly higher than inflation.
Here are a few of the charts from Stephan's presentation that I found especially useful. The presentation is almost entirely charts about demographics and budgets, and is worth flipping through for those of you who like your policy data to be quantitative.
This chart shows the NIH budget, in current dollars (blue) and constant dollars (green) over the last 30 years. Note the five-year doubling from 1998 to 2003, and the flat-line in current dollars and drop-off in inflation-adjusted dollars that we've had since 2003.
The next table I want to cite is a chart on the PowerPoint slides that I'll just blockquote here. It explains how the NIH doubling affected hiring of junior scientists. Note especially the last point.
New Construction
NSF reports greatest number of institutions began construction in fields of biological and medical sciences in FY2002 or FY2003.
56% of newly constructed space to be used for these 2 fields
Appears to be good news for early career biomedical scientists
Age of first assistantship [assistant professor position] fell for first time in 2003
Jobs on an increase (or were). But SDR [Survey of Doctorate Recipients] data is already out of date
The pickup was relatively modest for the young. Even in the best of times fewer than one-in seven of young biomedical PhDs have an academic appointment (tenure-track or non-tenure track).
Hiring was concentrated in non-tenure track positions.
The pickup that occurred was fueled in part by new buildings coming on line which in turn were fueled by NIH budget growth. Lagged the doubling.
That's the good news: the doubling fuels biology growth, and more lab space and assistant professorship positions are created, and it's easier to get a job. Here comes the bad news. Look at what happens to grant funding once the doubling stops and NIH budget gets choked off. The purple bars are the number of scientists submitting grant applications, the blue bars are the number of applicants getting funded, and the green line is the ratio (the percent of applicants who get funded). It's important to remember the difference between applications and applicants -- the chart here represents actual scientists, who may have each submitted multiple applications. The ones who didn't get funded may find themselves S.O.L. in keeping their labs running. Importantly, note that most of the drop-off in success rate comes from the increase in new scientists applying for grants.
Finally, here's a chart showing which scientists are getting rejected. Each stacked bar is the number of grants funded by year, and it's made up of a purple segment representing new investigators (those getting funds as they are just setting up their labs) and a blue segment representing established scientists (who have a solid track record and probably are getting multiple grants funded). Note especially the green line showing that the NIH is funding fewer young scientists with independent grants than at any time in the last four decades. So you've just become an assistant professor, you've got your lab, you're hiring people for the first time, taking on students -- and you're already finding yourself in a funding crisis wondering if you're going to be able to keep the doors open.
It is foolish policy to pour resources into something for five years, and then starve it for five years. You not only waste the potential growth of the second five years, but you waste a good deal of your investment the first five years as well. Much of the funding that was poured into the NIH between 1998 and 2003 will be a loss as those research projects are put in the freezer and those young scientist trainees leave science.
I've said it before, but it bears repeating: Congress should commit to slow, steady, sustainable funding of NIH and other science agencies on a time scale of decades. It's the best policy for science, and the best investment of the public dollar.
Cross-posted from The Next Hurrah