About the NIH Almanac

For decades, the media, Congress, Federal administrators and employees, and the wider public have referred to the NIH Almanac, a reliable source of information about the National Institutes of Health (NIH), the Federal government’s principal medical research agency.

Updated annually, the Almanac offers information about NIH's budget, leadership, legislative chronology, and much more, including facts about the research programs and activities of the agency's 27 Institutes and Centers (ICs). This information spans the agency's history, from President Hoover's signing into law of the Ransdell Act (P.L. 71-251) — which transformed the Public Health Service Hygienic Laboratory into the NIH — to the addition of critical, contemporary research imperatives, such as biodefense and biosecurity. As Senator Ransdell said in 1931, the early planners of the NIH "saw with clear eyes the possibilities of the National Institute of Health for preventing and curing disease with its awful train of suffering and colossal economic losses to the world."¹ NIH has grown to its preeminent status as the largest source of funding for medical research in the world. Thanks in large part to NIH-funded medical research, Americans today continue to enjoy longer and healthier lives.

Over 83 percent of NIH's $39.2 billion FY 2019 final budget allocation went to more than 300,000 research personnel at over 3,000 universities, medical schools, and other research institutions in every state and throughout the world. While most ICs receive direct appropriations from the U.S. Congress, from which they award research grants and support scientific programs, non-research funding ICs — located on the agency's campus in Bethesda, Maryland — include the NIH Clinical Center, the agency's combined research hospital and laboratory complex; the Center for Scientific Review, which supports the scientific review of grant applications; and the Center for Information Technology, which provides, coordinates, and manages information technology for the NIH.

Additional information about NIH research funding can be found by visiting the Research Portfolio Online Reporting Tools (RePORT) website. RePORT allows users to obtain NIH funding information arranged by health disorder or condition, year, IC, state, Congressional district, funding mechanism, or other category. In addition, the Office of NIH History website features the agency's searchable history archives.

The NIH Almanac is compiled and edited by the Office of Communications and Public Liaison, OLIB@od.nih.gov.

If you have questions about past issues of the NIH Almanac, or you need more information about the history of NIH's programs and activities, please contact the Office of NIH History at history@nih.gov.

The Office of NIH History works with all NIH components to foster documentation, preservation, and interpretation of the history of the National Institutes of Health.

¹Radiology, May 1932 Radiology, 18, 942-947. From a presentation before the Radiological Society of North America at the Seventeenth Annual Meeting, at St. Louis, Nov. 30–Dec. 4, 1931.