Supercommittee Failure Could Mean Fewer NIH, NSF Grants - Genome Web

The inability of the Joint Select Committee on Deficit Reduction - the 'supercommittee' - to agree on a plan means that the fallback option, called sequestration, which was designed as a painful impetus to force a deal, calls for $1.2 trillion in across-the-board cuts. Scheduled to begin in 2013, half of these cuts to discretionary spending would be culled from defense spending, but the rest would come from other federal departments and agencies, including the National Institutes of Health and the National Science Foundation. According to an analysis by the House of Representatives Appropriations Committee Ranking Member Norman Dicks (D - Wash.), the sequestration plan will include a 7.8 percent cut for agencies such as NIH, NSF, and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Such a cut at NIH would mean the agency would be able to provide about 2,500 to 2,700 fewer research project grants per year. It also would mean a per-year cut of $530 million at NSF, which would translate to a cut of $430 million for research grants. At that level, NSF would be able to fund around 1,500 fewer research and education grants, supporting roughly 18,000 fewer researchers, students, and technical support personnel than it did in fiscal year 2011.