Stealth earmarks cripple merit-based NIH process

One of the best predictors for snagging a lucrative research grant from the National Institutes of Health is apparently not the quality of your proposal, but whether your local congress member has a seat on the House Appropriations Subcommittee, which oversees NIH, according to a recent study. In Washington, D.C., there’s a one-word description for this process: pork.

The study by UC Berkeley scholars Deepak Hegde and David Mowery reviewed 8,310 grant-seeking institutions between 1984 and 2003. Their findings, published in the journal Science, showed that states with one or more members on the House subcommittee on Labor, Health and Human Services, Education, and Related Agencies received significantly more NIH money than states with no subcommittee representation. No such correlation was found in the Senate’s LHHE subcommittee, but the same advantages applied to states with a sitting senator on the full Senate Appropriations Committee.

The study is significant. NIH, which has an annual budget of almost $30 billion and funds much of the nation’s biomedical research, has a rigorous peer-reviewed process that is supposedly impervious to political pressure. Hegde and Mowery also discovered that, while public universities and small businesses in subcommittee members’ home districts received 9 percent more NIH grants than those without a representative on LHHE, there was no similar perk for private universities, nonprofits or large companies.

Instead of outright earmarking NIH’s budget, members of Congress on these select panels may have subtly “steered” as much as 4 percent of NIH’s considerable grant money by legislatively “encouraging” the agency to spend more on specific diseases or avenues of research they knew their favored institutions were studying. NIH officials claim this is “absolute coincidence,” but the study’s authors estimate that $1.7 billion was distributed this way between 2002 and 2003, or roughly half of the total sum earmarked for all academic research.

The end result of injecting politics into a merit-based system is always the same, even in the ivy-covered towers of academia. When powerful political patrons in Congress steer stealth earmarks from the nation’s largest funder of academic research to politically connected institutions, rather than to the most deserving based on the strength of their research proposals, national resources are misdirected and everybody else pays a terrible price in terms of wasted money and lost treatment and healing
opportunities.