Mystery Language in the Federal Budget

In 2016, the 21st Century Cures Act asked the White House Office of Management and Budget (OMB) to create a “Research Policy Board” that would take a deep dive into reducing the bureaucratic burden on academic researchers.

Believe it or not, this is AI-generated. The Research Policy Board has never existed.

A worthy goal, and one that the Good Science Project has covered in some detail.

OMB refused to create the Research Policy Board, on the pretext that reducing bureaucracy might somehow affect indirect costs, thus violating other legislation that protected indirect costs. The Government Accountability Office wrote a stern report issued on Feb. 3, 2021, scolding OMB and urging it to start up the Research Policy Board. .

OMB didn’t do so, as Feb. 2021 was basically too late anyway. Under the 21st Century Cures Act, the board was about to expire on Sept. 30, 2021:

So, that was the end of that.

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You can imagine my surprise when I was recently browsing through a 1,012-page appropriations bill (as one does on a Friday night), and I saw this language on page 502 in a section about the NIH Director’s Office:

Wait, what? What does it even mean for Congress to tell NIH, “You can use some unspecified amount of money to create an inter-agency board that OMB was supposed to establish under a statute that has long since expired and never directly involved NIH anyway”?

Lo and behold, that same language has been cropping up before. The Consolidated Appropriations Act for 2023, enacted in Dec. 2022, included this same language:

So did the Consolidated Appropriations Act for 2022:

[This provision is NOT in the Consolidated Appropriations Act for 2021.]

As far as anyone knows, the language was first proposed in the President’s Budget for FY 2022:

I’ve asked several people who would be in a position to know, and so far, no one has any idea what is going on here. Even if the Research Policy Board hadn’t expired in 2021, it’s not clear that NIH would be in the best position to set up a cross-agency initiative whose only named members were the OIRA Administrator, OSTP Director, HHS Secretary, and NSF Director. Unsurprisingly, it doesn’t look like the NIH has created a Research Policy Board in the past few years.

So . . . what’s the point of inserting this language into every appropriations bill? What does anyone expect NIH to do here? Is there even any actual human being who could explain why they’re asking for this language, or is this just a vestigial holdover that keeps getting copied for no reason? Perhaps a reader will know.