HOUSE APPROVES NIH REAUTHORIZATION BILL, ADDRESSES ORGANIZATIONAL STRUCTURE

The House Sept. 26 overwhelmingly approved the National Institutes of Health Reform Act of 2006, H.R. 6164, by a vote of 414-2.

While Congress has doubled NIH's budget to approximately $28 billion in recent years, it has left "the hodge-podge structure of the agency" intact, resulting in "more money fueling the inherent inefficiency in which research was sometimes duplicated by institutes which literally didn't know that they were copying each other's work," the committee said.

H.R. 6164 would:

Authorize a 5 percent annual increase in NIH's budget for fiscal years 2007 to 2009;

Launch a new, agency-wide electronic reporting system to catalogue all of NIH's research activities in a standard format;

Limit the overall size of the NIH to the current 27 institutes and centers;

Set up a "common fund" to support particularly promising research that cuts across multiple institutes or centers, capped at 5 percent of the overall NIH budget; and

Create a scientific management review group to evaluate NIH's structural organization at least once every seven years and propose any restructuring plans it deems necessary.

The bill can be accessed at energycommerce.house.gov/108/Markups/09202006/BARTON_083_xml.09.12.06.pdf (http://energycommerce.house.gov/108/Markups/09202006/BARTON_083_xml.09.12.06.pdf).