By John Fritze and Andrea K. Walker, The Baltimore Sun Baltimore Sun

9:17 p.m. CST, February 13, 2012
WASHINGTON ——
"We've got to be very careful not to mess up a very fragile recovery," he said.

The budget calls for keeping NIH funding even next year at about $31 billion. Heather Higginbottom, deputy director of the Office of Management and Budget, said the agency nevertheless expects to increase the amount of grants it awards by 7 percent by finding ways to reduce the cost of administering those grants.

Maryland institutions received $1.7 billion in NIH research and other funding in 2011.

"We think we've done a fair job with NIH," Higginbottom said. "There's a lot of difficult tradeoffs."

Timothy B. Wheeler and the Tribune Washington bureau contributed to this report.

john.fritze@baltsun.com

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andrea.walker@baltsun.com

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Maryland and the budget



President Obama's proposed $3.8 trillion budget for 2013 would have a broad impact on Maryland. It calls for:

•Increasing by 1.2 percent the amount federal employees contribute to their retirement

•Freezing funding for the Bethesda-based National Institutes of Health at about $31 billion

•Boosting Chesapeake Bay cleanup funding by $15 million while cutting other programs that affect the bay

•Cutting federal money for teaching hospitals, including those at Johns Hopkins and the University of Maryland.

— John Fritze

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