Biden proposes a funding surge—and new agencies to manage it

doi:10.1126/science.372.6539.221

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DOI	10.1126/science.372.6539.221
	Biden proposes a funding surge—and new agencies to manage it
	Jeffrey Mervis
	2021-04-16
发表期刊	Science
出版年	2021
英文摘要	President Joe Biden wants to go big and bold on science. The research community loves the big, but it has questions about the bold—especially Biden's plan for three new funding entities dedicated to health, technology, and climate. Last week, in his 2022 budget request, Biden laid out a $1.5 trillion blueprint that would increase discretionary spending by 8.4%. The $118 billion bump would fund healthy boosts at many federal research agencies (see table, right), including 20% hikes at the two largest: the National Institutes of Health (NIH), to $51 billion, and the National Science Foundation (NSF), to $10.2 billion. Biden is also asking Congress to expand their missions, creating units that would build on their basic research portfolios to address pressing societal problems. NIH would get $6.5 billion to stand up an Advanced Research Projects Agency-Health (ARPA-H) initially focused on cancer, diabetes, and Alzheimer's disease. NSF would get a new technology directorate, of an unspecified size, that would lead the nation's efforts to outinnovate China ( Science , 9 April, p. [112][1]). Biden also wants to create an ARPA-Climate to take more aggressive steps against global warming, although he didn't say where it would be housed. The model for all three entities is the military's Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA). Created during the Cold War, DARPA has both developed high-tech weaponry and funded research on civilian technologies that have spawned trillion-dollar industries. In the past 2 decades, lawmakers have used DARPA's template to create three additional ARPAs tasked with combating bioterrorism, developing new energy technologies, and assisting the intelligence community. Arati Prabhakar, a former DARPA director, calls the approach “solutions R&D.” She's thrilled that the Biden administration wants to expand on it. “The president is asking the R&D community to help with some of the biggest problems facing the country,” says Prabhakar, who in 2019 founded Actuate, a California-based nonprofit working with private philanthropy to tackle some of those challenges. Unlike most federal research agencies, which rely on scientists to submit ideas that fit into long-standing program areas and ask outside experts to judge their merit, DARPA gives its program managers the freedom to both solicit proposals and decide which should be funded. They are also quick to end projects that aren't making sufficient progress toward interim milestones. In contrast, other agencies that award basic research grants often give investigators considerable leeway to change course during the lifetime of the award. Prabhakar says those features have helped DARPA be successful. But she warns against “tarnishing the brand [by] slapping the label on something that isn't really DARPA.” It's important, she says, that any new DARPA clone address a pressing national need that can be met with innovative technology. ![Figure][2] DATA: WHITE HOUSE OFFICE OF MANAGEMENT AND BUDGET The president's 9 April budget outline doesn't give many details about ARPA-H. But the idea has been around for decades, and advocates say it meets Prabhakar's test. They argue that not enough NIH-funded research leads to treatments and cures. “ARPA-H is recognition that funding basic research doesn't necessarily drive commercial innovation and that there are market failures,” says geneticist Michael Stebbins, a consultant and former White House science office official. The new agency would help promising ideas cross the so-called valley of death that prevents many discoveries from reaching patients. He thinks ARPA-H's proposed $6.5 billion budget is warranted “because of the scale of the challenge.” Breaking the existing NIH mold is important, agrees Robert Cook-Deegan, a research policy professor at Arizona State University, Tempe, and longtime proponent of a DARPA-like agency at NIH. “I'm totally in favor of giving senior NIH people a lot of money and the flexibility to push the boundaries and work outside the existing system of peer review,” he says. But he wonders about the premise that new technologies are the key to improving health outcomes in the United States. “I'm not sure that curing cancer is an engineering problem,” he says. As vice president, Biden became a champion of cancer research after his son Beau Biden died from brain cancer in 2015, and he led the Obama administration's Cancer Moonshot that aimed to accelerate cures. He floated the idea of ARPA-H during his presidential campaign and more recently during a visit to a plant making a COVID-19 vaccine. But Biden's plan to place ARPA-H within the notoriously cautious NIH surprised some of the idea's staunchest advocates. “If it's just another fund within the NIH, we're not optimistic that it's going to succeed,” says Liz Feld, president of the Suzanne Wright Foundation, a pancreatic cancer research advocacy group. Instead, Feld and allies want ARPA-H to stand alone within NIH's parent agency, the Department of Health and Human Services. Other research advocates worry ARPA-H would divert money from NIH's existing 27 institutes and centers and say it should start smaller. “We do not believe it is in the nation's interest to channel funding away from other research priorities,” says Mary Woolley, president of Research!America, which is seeking a 10% boost for NIH's core programs. The fate and final form of ARPA-H and the other proposed ARPA-like entities will not be clear for months. Biden's proposal is the opening move in a budget process for the fiscal year that begins on 1 October and will involve extensive negotiations with Congress. Separately, legislators have already started to debate Biden's $2 trillion infrastructure plan, which includes a one-time injection of $200 billion for a host of research initiatives, including the new tech directorate at NSF. [1]: http://www.sciencemag.org/content/372/6538/112 [2]: pending:yes
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专题	气候变化资源环境科学
推荐引用方式 GB/T 7714	Jeffrey Mervis. Biden proposes a funding surge—and new agencies to manage it[J]. Science,2021.
APA	Jeffrey Mervis.(2021).Biden proposes a funding surge—and new agencies to manage it.Science.
MLA	Jeffrey Mervis."Biden proposes a funding surge—and new agencies to manage it".Science (2021).