Council News Vol. 7, no. 2

BALANCING THE BUDGET TO KEEP A HEALTHY STREAM OF RESEARCH
FUNDING, UHY PAYLINES ARE NOT KEY
NIH and NIAID are grappling with the prospect of a budget increase.
While obviously a positive move, fiscal choices will have to be made, and
expectations may exceed budget realities.

NIAID has been in excellent
fiscal health during the past
three years.
We are funding more investigators than ever before, and more
applicants have been successful
relative to those applying for
grants.
Numbers of competing (new or
recompeting) grants grew almost
40 percent-from 426 to 591 -from FY 1996 to FY 1998 alone
(see the graph on the next page).
While this success is positive, it
has greatly expanded NIAID's
commitment base (the money
the Institute spends on all years
of a grant; most of the base is
fixed due to the multiyear nature
of NIH grants, which average
four years in length).
Obviously, the larger the base,
the less money is left in the
budget for new awards.
Thus, the current growth rate
will probably not be sustainable,
even though grant numbers will
continue to rise in FY 1999.
Next fiscal year, NIAID will
have to strike a balance between
the need to maintain its commitments and keep enough monies
free to fund a healthy number of
new awards.
Burgeoning numbers of grants
and high-quality applications
(with fundable percentiles),

therefore, will likely prompt the
Institute to lower its payline in
FY 1999.
Though NIAID's final budget is
not known, we are projecting a
FY 1999 payline around the 20.0
percentile. (FY 1998 paylines
were at the 24.0 percentile for
non-AIDS and 26.0 for AIDSrelated applications.)
LLhot is the pay/ine?
The payline is the projected
cutoff point, set at the beginning
of the fiscal year, within which
most grants are funded.
So an application with a percentile rating of 19.0 will get an
award if NIAID's payline is at
20.0, but a grant with a percentile of 21.0 will not.
This appears to be straightforward but in fact is rather complex.
Programmatically important
grants, some applications responding to program announcements, applications responding
to RFAs, contracts, bridge
awards, and training grants are
funded from separate budget
categories and therefore do not
affect the R01 payline.
Further, the payline is just an
estimate. NIAID cannot know
ahead of time how all the bud:
getary factors will play them
selves out during the year, so the
payline tends to be conservative
(thus, at the end of the fiscal
year, an additional number of
grants with higher [worse] percentile rank
ings often get
paid).

Hou
importont
is the
pay/ine?
Investigators
often look at
an institute's
payline to
judge how
advantageous
it would be to

Due to the
expansion of
our budget's
commitment
base, the
current
growth rate
may not be
sustainable

target an application there.
When NIAID's payline was
lower than it is today, some
applicants requested assignment
to other institutes.
Now the tide has turned. More
people are requesting to have
their grants assigned to us; and
our program announcements are
attracting strong numbers of
new applications.
As we stated above, these factors will likely require NIAID
to pull paylines back somewhat
from FY 1998 levels.
The question for researchers is,
what's the impact on me?