However, without the sums budgeted for pandemic preparedness and ARPA-H, the NIH would actually receive only $275 million more than Congress allocated for the agency in 2022, says Jennifer Zeitzer, the director of public affairs at the Federation of American Societies for Experimental Biology in Bethesda, Maryland. Because the NIH is the largest public funder of biomedical research in the world, Zeitzer says that this level of funding is inadequate.
The request would also boost the Food and Drug Administration’s budget nearly 39% compared with 2021 — to $8.4 billion — largely due to a $1.6-billion boost from the pandemic preparedness fund that would allow the agency to modernize regulatory capacity, speed development of diagnostics and strengthen the personal-protective-equipment supply chain.
All told, the president’s budget would provide a record $19.1 billion for DOE’s main clean-energy programmes over the coming year, says David Hart, who heads the Center for Clean Energy Innovation at the Information Technology and Innovation Foundation, a think tank based in Washington DC. Around half of that money is already locked in through the infrastructure law, which also allows the DOE to spread its spending over five years.