Pie Gets Larger Not Smaller for NIH: ME/CFS Could Possibly Benefit

[Cort]

If the Senate Subcommittee is having it's way, for the third year in a row - the NIH is going to get another nice boost in funding.

While it doesn't mean that ME/CFS is going to get more money, it does mean that the pie just got a little bigger; i.e. they can't say they don't have extra funds available to devote to ME/CFS. The worries have been that given President Trump's proposed almost 25% cut in funding that the pie would get smaller. The Senate is definitely digging in. NIH funding, by the way is a bipartisan issue - both the Dems and the Republicans want it to rise.

Perhaps more importantly, though, Senate subcommittee also rejected President Trump's proposal to slash indirect payments to Universities which are critical to their maintaining their labs, doing research, etc.:devil: . That was a backdoor way to cut funding - which thankfully failed.

The big winners so far are Alzheimer's - which gets another huge boost for the second year in a row - and Brain Research. At the least the Brain Research increase may indirectly help us.

We'll see how it ends up. The House has proposed about a $1 billion increase - the two branches need to reconcile. However it ends up, it looks the NIH will get increased funding this year.

From Science - http://www.sciencemag.org/news/2017...ters-excellence-program#.WbGXcocfSN8.facebook.

A Senate subcommittee today approved a $2 billion raise, to $36.1 billion, for the National Institutes of Health (NIH) in the 2018 fiscal year that begins 1 October. That 6% raise is nearly twice what a House of Representatives panel has approved and contrasts with a 22% cut that President Donald Trump’s administration had proposed for the agency. To the relief of research universities, the Senate draft spending bill would also block a Trump proposal to slash NIH payments to cover the overhead costs of research.

Senator Roy Blunt (R–MO), chairperson of the Labor, Health and Human Services, and Education Appropriations Subcommittee, noted that this is the third year in a row that the committee has voted to boost NIH’s budget by $2 billion, a figure that prevailed in final spending bills in 2016 and 2017. The corresponding House panel has approved a $1.1 billion increase for the agency in 2018.

 

[GG]

Oh no, this is all Trumps fault, the sky is falling

GG

 

[Rob Rainford]

This is good news.

I really hope at least part of that large sum goes into ME/CFS research.