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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 ****************************** 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. ********************************* 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. **** Jim Cordy Pittsburgh [log in to unmask]