On March 15th, 2022—nearly six months late—President Biden signed the FY2022 spending bill. Compared with the previous fiscal year’s appropriations, total federal funding for R&D increased 7.1% to $169 billion. Although many agencies were allocated much less than the Biden administration had requested, all science agencies received increases in funding.
The total budget for all programs of the National Science Foundation (NSF) went up 4.1%, reaching $8.8 billion. The Department of Energy’s Office of Science’s budget received a 6.4% boost to $7.5 billion, and ARPA-E’s funding gained 5.4% to reach $450 million. Appropriations for the USDA’s Agriculture Research Service, which dropped 5.0% in FY2021, this year increased 15.3% to reach $1.76 billion. In contrast, the EPA’s total science and technology budget was bumped up a meager 2.9% to $750 million, with funds designated for Clean Air programs only.
Appropriations for the agency receiving the largest amount of research funding, the National Institutes of Health (NIH), increased 5.3% to a total of $45 billion. Budgets of the most well-funded institutes, the National Cancer Institute (NCI) and National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID) grew 5.4% and 4.2% to $6.9 billion and $6.3 billion, respectively. The institutes for which appropriations increased the most include the National Institutes on Aging (NIA), Drug Abuse (NIDA), and Minority and Health Disparities (NIMHD), whose budgets grew 7.8%, 8.2%, and 17.2% to $1.6 billion, $4.2 billion, and $460 million, respectively.
The Biden Administration additionally proposed the creation of the Advanced Research Projects Agency for Health (ARPA-H), to bolster the government’s ability to accelerate biomedical and health research. Although $6.5 billion was requested, the program, which focuses on agile, risky, and transformational biomedical research projects, received only $1 billion. ARPA-H is housed within NIH but the “high-risk, high-reward” program will be culturally and operationally unique from its counterparts, as it strives, per its mission, “to benefit the health of all Americans by catalyzing health breakthroughs that cannot readily be accomplished through traditional research or commercial activity.”