Last week, Congress agreed to give roughly 5% more money to many federal science agencies when it passed a $1.5-trillion government budget for 2022. But what science advocates had hoped would be a banner funding year fell victim to a bipartisan push to spend much more on defense than President Joe Biden had requested—and to one Democratic senator’s rejection of a separate Biden plan to allocate billions of additional dollars for research.
Besides beefing up the U.S. military, appropriators reduced by more than half the 16%, $110-billion increase Biden had sought for civilian programs—including a slew of new and expanded research initiatives. Biden had proposed boosting defense programs by only 1.8%, or $12 billion, but the annual spending package he signed into law on 15 March gives defense a 5.6% boost and civilian programs a 6.7% bump. Having a final 2022 budget also ends a 5-month governmentwide spending freeze that prohibited any new initiatives.
For the National Institutes of Health (NIH), the government’s biggest funder of academic research, that shift in priorities shrunk Biden’s proposed 21% hike, much of it for a new Advanced Research Projects Agency for Health (ARPA-H) to develop cutting-edge medical treatments, to 5%. The final bill, which gives NIH $45 billion, means ARPA-H will be launched with $1 billion rather than the $6.5 billion Biden had requested.
