American Recovery and Reinvestment Act (ARRA) of 2009
T he American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 (Recovery Act) was signed into law by President Obama on February 17, 2009 in an effort to jumpstart our economy, create or save millions of jobs, and begin to address long-neglected challenges so that our country can thrive in the 21st century. The Recovery Act provided $10.4 billion to the National Institutes of Health (NIH) to support research initiatives and some infrastructure improvements. The NLM share of that amount is roughly $84 million, most of which will be spent on extramural grants and Research and Development Contracts, due to legislative restrictions.
NIH will launch a number of initiatives to use the Recovery Act funds, which must all be awarded by September 30, 2010. The first of these is the NIH Challenge Grants in Health and Science Research, which will fund 200 or more grants, contingent upon the submission of a sufficient number of scientifically meritorious applications. NLM has thirteen challenge grant topics in the NIH Challenge Grant funding announcement, in areas of Bioethics, Comparative Effectiveness Research, Enabling Technologies, Enhancing Clinical Trials, Health Disparities, Information Technology for Processing Health Care Data for Research, and Translational Science. The application due date for the NIH Challenge Grants is April 27, 2009. More information about the NIH Challenge grants and about the NLM role in the Recovery Act can be found at: //www.nlm.nih.gov/recovery/
Florance V. American Recovery and Reinvestment Act (ARRA) of 2009. NLM Tech Bull. 2009 Mar-Apr;(367):e2.
