Congress has now passed and President Biden has signed into law all twelve fiscal year (FY) 2024 appropriations bills, almost six months after the fiscal year started. After passing a six-bill “minibus” package earlier in March, Congress passed the remaining six bills after briefly breaching the midnight March 22 deadline.
The second minibus combined spending bills for State-Foreign Operations, Financial Services-General Government, Legislative Branch, Labor-Health and Human Services (HHS), Defense, and Homeland Security.
The Labor-HHS spending bill includes a roughly 0.8 percent cut to the National Institutes of Health’s (NIH) budget, flat funding of $1.5 billion for the Advanced Research Projects Agency for Health (ARPA-H), and essentially flat funding for the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). President Biden had requested an $811 million boost for NIH and a $1 billion increase for ARPA-H.
Overall, NIH received $47.1 billion, $378 million below FY 2023. The National Cancer Institute was funded at $7.2 billion, an increase of $120 million over FY 2023. The National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, the National Human Genome Research Institute, and the National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences received essentially flat funding along with most of the other 27 NIH institutes and centers.
Notably, the final bill did not include controversial House-proposed measures to curb diversity efforts at NIH, restrict federal funding for fetal tissue research, and ban HHS-funded “gain of function” research on potential pathogens.
The Institute of Museum and Library Services, also funded under the Labor-HHS bill, received $294.8 million, equal to the FY 2023 enacted level for the agency. Its Office of Museum Services also received level funding of $55.5 million.
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