Politics and research grants

Despite the general perception that biomedical research funding decisions are apolitical, in the US, Congressional members steer billions of dollars in research money from the National Institute of Health (NIH) to researchers and institutions in their home states, according to a University of California, Berkeley study.

Doctoral student Deepak Hegde and David Mowery, the William A & Betty H Hasler Professor of New Enterprise Development at UC Berkeley’s Haas School of Business, revealed the surprising reach of House and Senate appropriations committee members.

In the study, Politics and Funding in the US Public Biomedical R&D System, published in Science magazine last December, Hegde and Mowery studied NIH grants between 1981 and 2002 and found 3–7% of the overall allocations are affected by political influence. The researchers examined NIH grants awarded to public universities and found in states with lawmakers on the House of Representatives appropriations subcommittee responsible for NIH appropriations, universities received an average of 9% more money than similar universities in states with no representative on the committee.

The study estimates that during 2001–2002 alone, committee members influenced the allocation of $1.7 billion out of a $37 billion dollar budget, directing about 4% of NIH grants to their own constituencies. Hegde suggests that ‘earmarks’ specifying the location of research could have been subtly avoided by merely encouraging the NIH to spend grant money on particular research fields and projects.

The study is the first of its kind and is available online.

A more elaborate version of the study with related results is in the November 2009 issue of the Journal of Law and Economics.