FY2008 Omnibus Appropriations
The Fiscal Year 2008 appropriations process came to a close when President Bush signed the FY 2008 omnibus appropriations bill into law on December 26, 2007. The omnibus bill consolidated eleven outstanding appropriations bills including the Labor-HHS bill which funds the National Institutes of Health (NIH) and the Energy and Water bill which funds the Department of Energy’s Nuclear Medicine Research program.
Funding for the NIH held largely flat relative to FY2007 spending levels – a tremendous disappointment in comparison to the Labor-HHS appropriation measure that President Bush vetoed in November 2007. The final omnibus measure included $4.8 billion for the National Cancer Institute and $299 Million for the National Institute of Biomedical Imaging and Bioengineering.
The measure also contains a provision mandating that all NIH-funded researchers submit electronic versions of published research papers to NIH within twelve months of publication. The purpose of this provision is to make NIH-funded research results freely accessible to the public via NIH’s PubMed Central digital archive.
The omnibus measure also included $17.5 million to restore funding for basic nuclear medicine research within the Department of Energy. ACR has worked with the Society of Nuclear Medicine and other interested organizations seeking restoration of this funding which was substantially cut in 2005.