Funding Uncertainty Is Hurting U.S. Health Research
Read the full article in MedPage Today
The health research enterprise in the U.S. is facing disaster, but Congress is starting to push back on the threat, Ellie Dehoney, MPH, senior vice president for policy and advocacy at Research!America, said here Thursday.
“The R&D [research and development] ecosystem itself is fragile because uncertainty is a killer,” Dehoney said at a conference on health research sponsored by the Association of Health Care Journalists. “That’s really the environment we’re living in. It’s probably because uncertainty is a killer, right? … There’s a lot of talk from the administration that trust has been breached with all of our research agencies and you have to build it back.”
However, “polls show that most people don’t even know these research agencies,” she continued. “But there is a subset of the population where there has been a decline in trust of any institution … and academic institutions certainly have taken a hit.”
Dehoney listed several issues of concern for research institutions, including “slow-walking” of grants; efforts to cut back on funding indirect costs such as spending on lab equipment and supplies; and “forward-funding” of grants so that, rather than doling out grant money evenly over the course of the grant period, the government pays all the money up front. “If you suddenly shift to upfront funding, then far fewer people get grants” because there is less money to give out each year, Dehoney said.
The good news is that Congress is beginning to push back on some of these tactics, she added. “I think the appropriations bills [being proposed] are higher funding than what the president requested. There are very few cases where the House went as low as the president did, and that’s a good sign.”
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