Leaders at the National Institutes of Health (NIH) are confronting a wave of pushback as they develop plans to dismantle the agency’s National Center for Research Resources (NCRR) to make way for a proposed new center devoted to translational science.

For many who have objected to the plan, often through comments on the NIH’s feedback website, the devil is in the details of the dissolution of NCRR, a $1.3 billion NIH center devoted to training and infrastructure. Its largest programme, the Clinical and Translational Science Awards, is slated to be transferred to the new National Center for Advancing Translational Sciences (NCATS). What happens to the rest of NCRR has been a subject of major concern for stakeholders, including 16 senators who wrote this letter of concern last week to NIH director Francis Collins.

Now, in advance of presenting its plan to the NIH’s Scientific Management Review Board (SMRB) during a public conference call tomorrow, an internal NIH task force charged with figuring out how to dissolve NCRR and where to put its pieces has posted an updated model of how the proposed reorganization would look.

In an accompanying, written description of the recommendations Larry Tabak, the agency’s principal deputy director and co-chair of the task force, wrote that the task force was guided by three prinicples as it developed the revised plan for placing the pieces of NCRR: achieving scientific synergies; achieving a good “fit” for a program with the new institute or center designated as its home; and how much disruption would result from the reorganization– as weighed, he says, against the “disruptive innovation” it would achieve.

The revised plan is different in several particulars from this straw model that was posted in January by the same task force. For instance, it moves a program of concern to the 16 senators, the Institutional Development Awards (IDeA), which aim to build infrastructure in states historically underrepresented in winning NIH grant awards. In the straw model, NIH leaders had placed the IDeA program in a so-called “Interim Infrastructure unit,” effectively a holding tank for pieces of NCRR that officials weren’t yet sure where to place.

The revised plan released today proposes instead to place the IdEA program in the $2 billion National Institute of General Medical Sciences (NIGMS).

(Collins had notified the complaining senators of this change in this February 16 letter. “He appreciates the response and is hopeful about the situation. There will be further discussions,” David Carle, a spokesman for Senator Patrick Leahy (Democratic, Vermont) said in response to Collins’ letter.)

Indeed, in the new plan, the “interim infrastructure unit” no longer exists. It has been replaced by a permanent new “Infrastructure Entity,” under the Director’s Office, which would continue to house some of the programs that had been in the interim unit, includiung non-human primate resources and extramural construction.

However, other pieces on the chess board have been moved: non-primate disease model resources, which in the straw model had been placed in NIGMS, are now delegated to the Infrastructure Entity, where they would continue, as they are currently, under the same roof as primate resources. Also moved to the Infrastructure Entity from NIGMS are shared and high-end instrumentation grants. The Science Education Partnership Awards (SEPA) have been moved to the Office of the Director and out of the interim unit.

But advocates, including Senator Daniel Inouye, the chairman of the Senate Appropriations Committee, who wanted the Research Centers in Minority Institutions housed with the IDeA program, will be disappointed. It has been left in the National Institute of Minority Health and Health Disparities (NIMHD).

Just how far this reshuffling will go towards allaying concerns of various constituencies remains to be seen. Jeremy Berg, the NIGMS director, who on 7 December was the only member of the SMRB to vote against the plan to create the NCATS and dissolve the NCRR, says that he doesn’t feel strongly one way or another about the details of the revised plan — although he notes that the move to put all animal model resources under the same roof is clearly responsive to complaints that have been voiced by the community.

But in general, Berg says, he is “troubled” by the haste and nature of the process that has led to this point. On December 7, when the SMRB approved the NCATS, he says, “there should have been a transparent process with all options on the table including keeping NCRR intact…..instead of deciding before you start that NCRR is being broken up and then figuring out how to make that work.”

For a lengthier version of Berg’s views, his public comment to tomorrow’s SMRB meeting can be read here.

The presentation to the SMRB tomorrow is informational in nature. Next steps revolve around the agency presenting the specifics of its plan to Congress in the coming weeks, with dollar figures attached — and on Congressional appropriators agreeing to that funding. “If there’s no money for it, then it doesn’t exist,” notes one Congressional insider.

As our recent budget coverage notes, NCATS was not funded as a discrete entity in US president Barack Obama’s budget 2012 budget request. Last week, Collins said that funding details for NCATS will be delivered to Congress in a budget amendment in the coming weeks.

UPDATE: An earlier version of this blog did not include the detail that the Infrastructure Entity would be housed under the Director’s Office and would therefore not constitute a change to the 2007 law that caps the number of agencies and institutes at NIH at 27.