When Congress boosts the NIH budget midyear weird stuff happens
April 19, 2018
Interesting comment about NIGMS recent solicitation of supplement applications for capital equipment infrastructure.
https://twitter.com/holz_lab/status/986310542678810624?s=21
If true this says some interesting things about whether NIH will ever do anything to reduce churn, increase paylines and generally make things more livable for their extramural workforce.
DrugMonkey 
April 19, 2018 at 12:21 pm
Hmm. Are you sure you aren’t a car commuter looking at the DOT repairing bridges and wondering why they don’t just add more lanes to reduce traffic?
(for those that don’t know- adding more lanes doesn’t reduce traffic, people just drive more)
I actually think that overall the ARRA funds were spent pretty sensibly- I got the impression that there was a meaningful effort to spread it around and ensure it got used quickly, but not to expand the total mouths at the trough. If that’s true, we “know” how to spend “extra” money. But reducing paylines may make institutions greedy- we’ve got a lot of bright shiny new lab space that our institution would just love to fill with faculty members bringing in more juicy indirects and I doubt we’re alone.
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April 19, 2018 at 12:55 pm
I am pretty sure you’ve read my calls to reduce the number of cars on the road, aka mouths at the trough, becca.
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April 19, 2018 at 3:05 pm
Any idea how GM keeps such high paylines? Hint – cut the everloving shit out of everyone’s budget higher up the list! I’m all for “spreadin’ it around”, but when I get an ZOMFG most excellent score on a modular budget R01, I expect the full budget dammit! Not 2 modules axed fom the get-go, plus all that continuing resolution crap as-and-when. All so they can pick-up a 27% straggler who’d be SOOL elsewhere.
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April 19, 2018 at 7:23 pm
WTF? NICHD is still at ~ 10%. And even some of those aren’t getting funded – I know a few P grants unfunded despite ranking 2 or 3. And my university is hemorrhaging faculty. We’re down ~25% in two departments I’m associated with from not replacing anybody after normal retirements, forced early retirements, and leaving-for-places-occasional-raises. Don’t worry, we’ll all die out soon and leave you less mouths at the trough.
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April 19, 2018 at 8:05 pm
I don’t want die off. I want reasonable birth control measures.
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April 20, 2018 at 10:03 am
Sorry. Bad week. We all want steady, sustainable funding.
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April 20, 2018 at 11:25 am
I wonder if NICHD paylines are a lasting result of Insel’s purge of basic behavioral research from NIMH?
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April 20, 2018 at 4:32 pm
NIGMS doesn’t have a payline at 30%. Their council just exerts a lot of discretion with proposals, as they should.
It’s more like a few lucky proposals with a score in the 30th percentile were funded, but lots of applications that scored in the 20s did not get funded.
See https://loop.nigms.nih.gov/2011/01/fiscal-year-2010-r01-funding-outcomes-and-estimates-for-fiscal-year-2011/
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April 22, 2018 at 11:58 am
Nichd’s problem is mostly large clinal trial networks
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