On March 9, President Joe Biden unveiled his FY 2024 budget request, a highly detailed blueprint for federal spending that reflects his funding recommendations. While Congress may consider a president’s recommendations, Congress itself ultimately decides all discretionary funding decisions through the annual appropriations bills.

Despite the President Biden’s staunch support of NIH and biomedical research, his budget request seeks a very small $800 million increase (1.7 percent) for the NIH base budget in FY 2024. His proposal would provide flat funding for most NIH Institutes and Centers, including the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases. The President does seek to ramp up investment in ARPA-H with a proposed $1 billion increase (66.7 percent).

Last year, the President’s budget included a very bold $81 billion pandemic preparedness proposal that was endorsed by AAI. His FY 2024 budget request includes a significantly scaled back version of that proposal, calling for $20 billion in mandatory funding for these activities, including $2.690 billion for NIH.

For a detailed description of Biden’s funding recommendation for NIH, see the NIH Congressional Justification for FY 2024.

The nine 2022-23 AAI Public Policy Fellows Program (PPFP) participants, together with CPA Chair Peter Jensen and Advocacy Programs Subcommittee Chair Gretchen Diehl, Ph.D., traveled to Washington, D.C., for a two-day Capitol Hill Day program last month. On March 21, the group convened for a dinner featuring remarks by Acting NIAID Director Hugh Auchincloss, M.D., DFAAI (AAI ’83), who has spoken at this event every year since the program’s inception. The dinner also included presentations by AAI Director of Public Policy and Government Affairs Lauren Gross, J.D., and AAI Senior Manager of Science Policy and Legislative Affairs Jake Schumacher, to further prepare the Fellows for their upcoming Hill visits.

On March 22, the Fellows visited 25 congressional offices, including meetings with five Senators and three Members of Congress. Throughout the day, the Fellows communicated the importance of immunological research and increased funding for NIH, AAI support for ARPA-H, the ongoing challenges of COVID-19 (including the need for next generation vaccines and treatments), and the importance of preparing for the next pandemic.

In August 2022, the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP) released a memo entitled, “Ensuring Free, Immediate, and Equitable Access to Federally Funded Research,” instructing federal agencies that fund scientific research to update their public access policies no later than Dec 31, 2025, “to make publications and their supporting data resulting from federally funded research publicly accessible without an embargo on their free and public release.”

To comply with the provisions of the memo and provide ample time for stakeholder input, on, NIH released (on February 21, 2023) its draft Public Access Plan and an RFI seeking feedback on the plan.

In response to the RFI, AAI submitted comments urging NIH to proceed slowly and thoughtfully, with full consideration given to the impact that the plan could have on not-for-profit scientific society publishers. Scholarly publishers like AAI often depend on revenue generated by their journals to provide scientific peer review and editing, and invest heavily to ensure that access to scientific information is accurate and reliable. This net revenue also helps to support scholarly society programs and activities that advance their dedicated scientific fields and support their members. AAI also calls attention to the potentially deleterious impact that a fully open access publishing model, which would likely increase publication costs for authors, may have, especially on under-resourced investigators and institutions, and urges NIH to provide comprehensive guidance on all ways investigators can charge publication costs.

NIH recently released its Strategic Plan for Diversity, Equity, Inclusion, and Accessibility (DEIA) for fiscal years (FY) 2023-2027. As further explained in an accompanying Open Mike blog post, the Strategic Plan is organized around three key objectives:

1) “Operations: Grow and Sustain DEIA Through Structural and Cultural Change
2) Workforce: Implement Organizational Practices to Center and Prioritize DEIA in the Workforce
3) Research: Advance DEIA Through Research”

Each objective in this report is broken down into subobjectives, goals, and strategies to achieve these objectives. The Strategic Plan also includes three cross-cutting themes that are central to achieving these objectives: “promote transparency, communication, and engagement; foster sustainable change; and harness data.”

AAI will closely monitor the implementation of this Strategic Plan and other associated efforts to enhance DEIA across NIH and the broader biomedical research workforce.

On June 3, President Joe Biden signed into law the Fiscal Responsibility Act of 2023 (FRA), a bipartisan measure that, among other things, suspends the federal debt limit, places caps on discretionary spending, and rescinds some unspent COVID-19 funds. The new law is the product of long negotiations between Democrats and Republicans, mostly notably between President Biden and Speaker of the House Kevin McCarthy (R-CA, 20th).

Crucially, the FRA suspends the federal debt limit until January 2, 2025. Shortly before the enactment of this legislation, the nation was on the verge of breaching the debt ceiling, threatening the U.S.’s ability to meet its fiscal obligations and endangering the country’s credit rating. However, Speaker McCarthy and many other Congressional Republicans had indicated that they were unwilling to lift or suspend the debt limit unless it was paired with cuts to nondefense spending (a very broad category that includes, but is not limited to, programs related to medical research, health, transportation, immigration, housing, and labor). As a result, the new law does significantly restrain spending in this category.

According to the White House, the FY 2024 cap on nondefense spending, excluding funding for veterans’ programs, will be $637 billion, $1 billion below the amount that was appropriated for FY 2023. For FY 2025, the cap will increase by just one percent to ~$643.5 billion. Under these caps, it will be very difficult for Congress to increase funding for any nondefense agencies and programs, including NIH, and any increases that are provided will likely result in cuts to other parts of the federal government. Defense spending, however, will increase by three percent in FY 2024 to $886 billion and by one percent in FY 2025 to $895 billion.

The FRA also rescinds about $30 billion in unspent funding originally appropriated to combat the COVID-19 pandemic. However, it has been widely reported that the $5 billion in COVID-19 funding that was recently allocated to launch Project NexGen, which aims to expedite the development of new COVID-19 vaccines and treatments, will not be rescinded.

In spite of these fiscal challenges, AAI will continue to advocate for the increases it believes research agencies need to operate well, including appropriating at least $51 billion for NIH and providing substantial funding for ARPA-H for FY 2024.