Center News

FY 2010 Federal Biodefense Spending

Majority of funding goes to programs with both biodefense & non-biodefense goals

SEPTEMBER 23, 2009 – Baltimore, MD – Since 2001, the U.S. government has substantially increased funding toward preparing the nation against a bioterrorist attack. For the past several years, the Center for Biosecurity of the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center has analyzed government spending on biosecurity. In an article published in the journal Biosecurity and Bioterrorism, author Crystal Franco updates the figures for FY2009-FY2010 and looks at where the money is going.

The article analyzes the budget requests for FY2010 for biodefense at the Departments of Health and Human Services, Homeland Security, Defense, Agriculture, and State as well as the Environmental Protection Agency and the National Science Foundation.

This year, for the first time, an analysis was conducted to determine how much of the biodefense funding serves multiple programmatic goals and benefits, both biodefense and non-biodefense related. Among the findings:

The President’s overall FY2010 budget request for civilian biodefense totals $6.05 billion, an increase of $330.9 million over the previous year’s estimate.
Of the $6.05 billion requested, $1.09 billion is for programs that are strictly for biodefense; $4.96 billion—more than 80%—is budgeted for programs with multiple goals and benefits, including funding for basic science research in infectious diseases, programs to enhance public health preparedness for disasters, programs to broadly improve hospital preparedness, and programs to improve disease surveillance for natural and deliberate infectious disease epidemics.
Over the course of 10 fiscal years analyzed in the “Billions for Biodefense” series, $54.39 billion has gone to civilian biodefense, but $42.57 billion of that money has been devoted to programs with such multiple goals and benefits.
As in previous years, the Department of Health and Human Services is the chief recipient of biodefense monies (75%). The FY2010 budget request is $215 million more than the FY2009 estimate, with most of the money going to the National Institutes of Health (NIH) (38%) and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) (34%).

“Billions for Biodefense: Federal Agency Biodefense Funding, FY2009-FY2010” by Crystal Franco appears in the September 2009 issue of Biosecurity and Bioterrorism. The full text is available at https://www.liebertpub.com/doi/pdf/10.1089/bsp.2009.0035.

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