Budget Proposal For Intramurals: Fill & Download for Free

The way you have described science funding is inaccurate. Scientists don’t ask for money from the government to do research, they submit proposals to government-run agencies for a cut of their extramural research budget (e.g. National Science Foundation, National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, Department of Defense, National Institutes of Health, Environmental Protection Agency, etc). These agencies typically receive a chunk of money from the discretionary budget to go towards intramural and extramural research that is agreed upon by agency officials and Congress, and once the agencies receive the money, they put out a research funding announcement (RFA) that describes what the money is to be used for and calls for academics and other researchers to submit proposals to receive some money for research in those areas. Stem cell research is one possible research goal of an NIH, NSF, or DOD grant, so researchers will submit proposals to perform stem cell research to one of these (or other) agencies to get money.In essence, researchers don’t ask for the government to fund more research, rather the funding agencies reach out to scientists to compete for their extramural research money.

The National Institutes of Health (NIH) is a biomedical research facility, an agency of the United States Department of Health and Human Services, it is the primary agency of the United States government responsible for biomedical and health-related research. The NIH both conducts its own scientific research through its Intramural Research Program (IRP) and provides major biomedical research funding to non-NIH research facilities through its Extramural Research Program.With 1,200 principal investigators and more than 4,000 postdoctoral fellows in basic, translational, and clinical research, the IRP is the largest biomedical research institution in the world,while, as of 2003, the extramural arm provided 28% of biomedical research funding spent annually in the U.S., or about US$26.4 billion.To allocate funds, the NIH must first obtain its budget from Congress. This process begins with institute and center leaders collaborating with scientists to determine the most important and promising research areas within their fields. Leaders discuss research areas with NIH management who then develops a budget request for continuing projects, new research proposals, and new initiatives from the Director. NIH submits its budget request to the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS), and the HHS considers this request as a portion of its budget. Many adjustments and appeals occur between NIH and HHS before the agency submits NIH's budget request to the Office of Management and Budget (OMB). OMB determines what amounts and research areas are approved for incorporation into the President's final budget. The President then sends NIH's budget request to Congress in February for the next fiscal year's allocations. The House and Senate Appropriations Subcommittees deliberate and by fall, Congress usually appropriates funding. This process takes approximately 18 months before the NIH can allocate any actual funds. (https://fas.org/sgp/crs/misc/RL33695.pdf)

There is no one way to answer this question. Research freedom is more a function of the lab and one’s career stage than the sector of the economy. Instead of selecting a career direction based on perceived research freedom, open up your mind to research opportunities where you can perform research that is interesting to you and impactful. Plenty of interesting and impactful research is done in government and industry labs, so don’t limit yourself to academia with the false pretense that you’ll have infinite freedom to do the research you want. The truth is that the funding climate in academia is brutally competitive right now, and once you start writing grants, getting feedback, and revising, you may find that the research freedom afforded by your research institute is less important than availability of funding and time to focus on the research. The funding atmosphere in academia does not necessarily lend itself to research freedom.[1][1][1][1]Figure: Number of and success rate of competitive NIH grant applications over time.[2][2][2][2]Academic labs are funded primarily by government research grants in the US, which fall under the extramural budgets of various government agencies like NIH, NSF, NOAA, EPA, DOE, DOD, etc. Each agency puts out a research funding announcement, and academics reply to the RFAs with a proposal detailing their research plan, preliminary data to demonstrate feasibility, and most importantly, a significance, impact, and novelty statement. Research in academia is set up to answer more high risk, high reward basic research questions, moreso than either industry or government, as a result of the funding structure, but academic researchers still must report to their funders and follow their own research plans, else they may build a reputation that puts future funding in jeopardy. Furthermore, because of the limited availability of funding for academic research labs, creativity and novelty may be at odds with feasibility and impact, which requires workable ideas with a high degree of feasibility and clear usefulness. In the end, all research regardless of where it is performed must be translatable and useful to other scientists and the general public.Government labs and industry labs share the intramural research budget from within their organizations, and as a result, the research directions must fall in line with the current goals and research directions of the organization. In this way, there are limits to the types of questions that government and industry labs can answer, since the bulk of the research must be applied, versus academia, where the research tends to be more basic.Ultimately, research freedom is a function of who is doing the research. A principal investigator in any sector will have the freedom to select research directions, and scientists and postdocs will have more freedom than a grad student or technician to propose their own ideas and carry out their own research regardless of the sector.Footnotes[1] The undesirable consequences of the growing pressure on faculty to get grants (essay)[1] The undesirable consequences of the growing pressure on faculty to get grants (essay)[1] The undesirable consequences of the growing pressure on faculty to get grants (essay)[1] The undesirable consequences of the growing pressure on faculty to get grants (essay)[2] Grant Renewal Success Rates: Then and Now[2] Grant Renewal Success Rates: Then and Now[2] Grant Renewal Success Rates: Then and Now[2] Grant Renewal Success Rates: Then and Now