The Scientist is reporting that the Senate has added to the stimulus bill, by amendment, an additional $6.5 billion in funding for the National Institutes of Health (NIH).  Given the apparent rediscovery of reduced government spending by the Republican Party and the continued incompetence of the Congress, it remains to be seen whether this current stimulus bill goes anywhere.  If it does, there are at least two serious issues worth noting:

The NIH may well repeat the failures of the doubling.  Many of the issues related to the end of the doubling of the NIH budget can be credited to acting as though the heavy budget increases were not temporary, but perpetual.  Excess capacity of buildings, tools and people can be credited to a lack of foresight in thinking about what would happen once the increases ended.  The stimulus will be a small repeat of the doubling.  The increases will be smaller, and the landing will be faster.  Nothing will change, and the problems the biomedical community has now will return by 2012.  The absence of new leadership at the top of NIH makes the likelihood of insufficient strategic planning – and the repeating of mistakes – all the greater.

The physical sciences have poor advocates.  Those following the COMPETES legislation, which was supposed to provide a doubling of research budgets for the National Science Foundatin, the National Institute of Standards and Technology, and the Department of Energy’s Office of Science.  The bill was made law, but the money has yet to be appropriated at the levels authorized in the bill.  If researchers in these communities continue to fail to make their case, they really need to look to other sources for funding.

There’s a lot of cognitive dissonance in my head where this stimulus effort is concerned.  Should this additional NIH funding come through, some of that dissonance will be replaced by a sadness at the inability of well-meaning researchers and research administrators to fail to learn from their history.