In a bill released this week, lawmakers in the US House of Representatives are seeking a 3 percent increase to the National Institutes of Health's budget, as GenomeWeb has reported.
It adds that the Labor, Health and Human Services, and Education committee has proposed that NIH receive funding to the tune of $35.2 billion for fiscal year 2018 — $8.6 billion more than what President Donald Trump requested. In March, the Trump Administration's funding blueprint called for an 18 percent cut to the NIH budget, a proposal it repeated in May. This bill "explicitly rejects" that plan, Nature News adds.
The House bill would also prevent proposed cuts to overhead payments, ScienceInsider says. As a means of offsetting some of its proposed cuts, the Trump Administration also suggested capping overhead payments made to institutions housing research labs.
The spending bill also, though, prohibits NIH from funding research that uses fetal tissue, ScienceInsider notes in a separate piece. A one-sentence rider says: "None of the funds made available by this Act may be used to conduct or support research using human fetal tissue if such tissue is obtained pursuant to an induced abortion." According to ScienceInsider, NIH spent $103 million in 2016 on projects using fetal tissue and is expected to spend $107 million on such projects this fiscal year.