I don't think they should be quoted as saying there is a 6% decrease in overall funding. As one person said:
The intramural funding is always difficult to estimate. The real story here is that extramural mural funding is not growing. The RFA-funded Cooperative Research Centers were supposed to be a jumpstart for extramural research. The idea was that those researchers who applied to be funded for one of the Centers and were not chosen would resubmit portions of their applications for funding as individual grants. This didn’t happen, with the exception of Rom Davis. I have no idea why. People have discussed that the problem is in the difficulty of obtaining funding, but proposals for ME/CFS research have, at this point, at least as good a chance of being funded as any other grant - maybe a bit more. In my opinion the reasons are historical and, to be fair, predate the current leadership of NIH. When the interest in this disease was high, NIH was doing a terrible job of addressing this disease. Individual grants are the heart of NIH’s program. As Dr Koroshetz has stated, proposals come in and NIH funds them until the relevant pile of money runs out. The small number of individual grant proposals was a shock to the patient community as well as to NIH. It means that they have to try additional methods quickly or risk the collapse of the research community that has just begun to grow.
