By Eve Herold –
The US National Institutes of Health has long been the world’s premier funder of biomedical research. In the public discourse, it’s often discussed in terms of costs to the national budget, but let’s flip that angle on its head and consider that the NIH is a huge multiplier of economic benefits. The nonprofit United for Medical Research has released a brief report showing that every $1 granted to NIH-funded research generates $2.46 in economic activity for the states, cities and communities where the research is being done. In other words, the economic benefit is more than double the expenditure through research grants. Funded labs and institutions not only purchase supplies and services—they generate a large number of jobs, stimulating more tax income, and those individuals infuse money into their local economies. UMR reports that in FY 2023, the NIH awarded $37.81 billion in grants, which supported 412,041 jobs and contributed $92.89 billion in economic activity. This formula is true across all the states (red- and blue-leaning) and the District of Columbia. The above numbers don’t even address the not-so-small economic benefits of a thriving biotechnology sector that builds on NIH-funded research, and new treatments and better health among the beneficiary populations. We need to reframe the discussion of NIH grants from characterizing them as costs to seeing them as the massive economic stimulus they are.
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