Sophia Bollag/Medill
WASHINGTON – Senate Majority Whip Richard Durbin said Tuesday he will introduce a bill to provide “steady, predictable funding” for biomedical research, saying the U.S. has an “innovation deficit.”
During a speech at the non-partisan think tank, the Center for National Policy, Durbin called government-funded research the foundation of American innovation and warned that the U.S. could lose its position as a global leader.
“America’s place as the world’s innovation leader and our future prosperity are at risk because we are no longer adequately investing in basic science,” Durbin, D-Ill., said. “We need to close our innovation deficit now.”
Durbin’s bill would increase funding each year for the National Institute of Health, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the Department of Defense Health Program, and the Veterans Medical and Prosthetics Research Program to account for GDP-indexed inflation plus 5 percent.
Sens. Jack Reed, D-R.I., Sherrod Brown, D-Ohio, and Mazie Hirono, D-Hawaii, are co-sponsoring the bill, and Durbin said he hopes to find more supporters from both parties.
The bill would cost $150 billion over the next 10 years, according to estimates from the Congressional Budget Office.
Durbin described the modest funding increases for research in President Barack Obama’s budget as “good, but not good enough,” saying research needs even more money in order to succeed.
The president’s budget, released last week, increases the NIH’s more-than $30 billion budget by $211 million in the coming year, which amounts to an increase of less than 100th of a percent from the last fiscal year.
The percentage of the federal budget that goes toward research has been shrinking at an alarming rate since the 1960s, Durbin said, and increases have not kept up with inflation.
Matthew Jensen, an economic research associate at the American Enterprise Institute, a conservative think tank, said in a telephone interview that that he agreed research could improve with federal funding. But Jensen said he would like to see federal research institutions such as the NIH spend less money on applied research and more on fundamental research. Applied research, which seeks to achieve specific goals, should be left to private research organizations, he said.
“Typically the commercial sector is better at directing applied research toward the types of innovations that the commercial sector will end up selling,” Jensen said. “Increased research funding is a worthy goal, but the funding should be targeted to the types of research that advance our understanding of the world, research that’s fundamental in nature.”
In an interview after his speech, Durbin said he anticipates opposition from Republicans over how to pay for the bill.
“They’ll agree on the research end, but in terms of how it’s paid for, how it’s funded, that’s where we haven’t found common ground,” he said.
The most critical next step in passing the bill will be to convince Republicans to support it, Durbin said in the interview.
“Most importantly, we need a breakthrough on the Republican side of the aisle when it comes to medical research. They’ve been very slow to join this effort,” Durbin said. “If this is bipartisan, it has a chance.”
