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NSF quicker than NIH with economic recovery dollars

As the 2009 fiscal year comes to a close, the new director of the AAAS R&D budget and policy programme, Patrick Clemins, has put up a timely analysis of how three major science agencies — DOE, NIH and NSF — are doing spending the billions they were given in the Recovery Act funding associated with February’s economic stimulus package.

Clemins identifies that, of $32.7 billion given to the DOE for everything from weatherization grants to ‘smart grid’ investment, the agency has only spent $11.2 billion. Within the DOE’s office of science, however, the spending is almost complete: $1.3 billion of $1.6 billion has been spent.

At the NIH, $2.7 billion of $10.4 billion has been spent, while the NSF has spent $2.2 billion of its $3 billion in stimulus funding. The NSF seems faster than the NIH, Clemins says, because the NIH made the decision to spread the funding out over two fiscal years, 2009-2010, while the NSF was aiming to finish in one. “They [the NIH] are actually on schedule even though they appear behind the rest of them,” says Clemins, who adds that another reason why the NIH is behind in spending is because it established more new grant programmes — something that takes time — while the NSF spent most of its money by simply increasing success rates for existing grant programmes.

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