Excerpts from  American Associations  of Universities
http://www.tulane.edu/~aau/index.html

Issued prior to Omnibus bill vote
Unofficial documents indicate that the Labor/HHS/ Education portion of the
omnibus bill will provide $15.662 billion for the National Institutes of
Health in FY'99, as well as $40 million in FY2000 funding for construction
of the clinical center on the NIH campus. This total exceeds the FY'99
funding in both the House and Senate Labor/HHS/Education appropriations
bills: it is $40 million higher than the Senate's FY'99 figure and $760
million higher than the House's figure. The total is also $860 million
higher than the President's FY'99 request. The $15.662 figure represents an
increase of about $2 billion, or 14.7 percent, over FY'98NATIONAL

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Issued After Passage
INSTITUTES OF HEALTH
--NIH Funding in the bill totals $15.652 billion, of which $40 million is
provided in advance for FY2000. The total is $2.03 billion, or 14.9 percent,
above the FY'98 level.
--The Senate earmark of $175 million for prostate cancer research throughout
the NIH was not included in the omnibus bill.
--Senate authorizing language creating a NIH Center for Complementary and
Alternative Medicine was included without revision in the omnibus bill,
along with Senate language providing $50 million for the Center.
--The omnibus bill changes the salary cap for investigators funded through
NIH grants from $125,000 to Level III of the Executive Schedule, which is
presently $125,900. That level will presumably be increased next year, when
federal salaries are adjusted for cost of living increases. This is an
entirely new provision; neither the House nor the Senate bill called for
such a change.
--The omnibus bill retains various provisions from the House and Senate
bills that will: add the word "Craniofacial" to the name of the NIH Dental
Institute; name a lab facility on the NIH campus after Rep. Louis Stokes
(D-OH) and a campus vaccine research facility after Sen. and Mrs. Dale
Bumpers (D-AR); and provide $30 million for extramural NIH facility
construction, to be competitively awarded. Report language indicates that
NIH would expect to spend $1.793 billion of the total appropriated for NIH
on AIDS research.
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Other News
Executive Branch:
Varmus Convenes Meeting on IOM Recommendations
National Institutes of Health Director Harold Varmus September 21 convened a
public meeting to discuss NIH's response to two recommendations in the
recent Institute of Medicine (IOM) report on NIH priority-setting.
The IOM report was mandated by Congress to address the concerns of advocacy
groups who feel that NIH is not paying enough attention to health care costs
and disease incidence in allocating research funding. The report urged NIH
to establish a Council of Public Representatives for the Director and
Offices of Public Liaison in each institute.
The September 21 public meeting was intended to obtain advice on the
composition, responsibilities and selection of the director's Council and
the institute offices. Twenty-three panelists, nominated by the individual
institutes, participated. The panelists were intentionally chosen to avoid
gathering the "usual suspects" who have well-known views on
priority-setting.
The discussion, led by Varmus throughout, was wide-ranging. Some panelists
focused on NIH's efforts to communicate with the public about its mission
and science advances, wile others advocated a director's panel that would
influence NIH's decision-making (for example, by setting criteria for
priority-setting and checking institute performance against those
standards).
Varmus indicated that even defining the very large number of groups that
should be considered NIH's "publics" was a challenge. He expressed his
preference that the director's public representatives panel not exceed 20
members, for fear of creating a "United Nations" that would degenerate into
provincialism. He said he was in the process of expanding his existing
Director's Advisory Council to include more lay representatives.
Varmus did not indicate that this advisory group would meet again, nor did
he describe when and how the IOM-recommended panel and offices would be
constituted. After the meeting, NIH staff indicated that this session did
not focus on priority-setting because they knew that topic would be a key
part of any subsequent panel discussions.

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Jim Cordy
Pittsburgh
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