The stimulus was a boon for biomedical research. Outside of the stimulus, not so much.

During the 2008 presidential campaign, Barack Obama promised to "strengthen funding for biomedical research, and better improve the efficiency of that research by improving coordination both within government and across government/private/non-profit partnerships.”

First, let's look at the recent funding patterns for the National Institutes of Health, the federal government's main avenue for funding biomedical research. NIH funds several hundred thousand research positions at more than 2,500 public and private universities and research institutions across the country.

The stimulus allocated about $10 billion to NIH. Of that, more than $8 billion went to research. (Most of the remainder went to construction, facilities and equipment costs.)

The stimulus "was a very real, very large boost,” said Matt Hourihan, director of the research and development budget and policy program at the American Association for the Advancement of Science.

Still, the increase in the stimulus was temporary, and if you compare NIH funding in fiscal year 2009 to fiscal year 2012, the appropriated budget now is only about 2 percent higher than it was three years earlier.

This pattern held across the range of NIH's operations: Virtually every institute within NIH saw its budget increase by about 2 percent between 2009 and 2012, including such visible ones as the National Cancer Institute; the National Heart, Lung and Blood Institute; the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases; the National Institute of Mental Health; the National Institute on Drug Abuse; and the National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism.

"If you look only at regularly appropriated research and development funding and adjust for inflation, life-sciences research has basically been stagnant since 2009,” Hourihan said, adding that the Obama administration sought bigger increases, but Congress allowed only smaller bumps.

Meanwhile, for fiscal year 2013, the administration proposed the same amount of funding for NIH as in 2012.

Now let's look at the other part of the promise -- to "improve the efficiency” of biomedical research "by improving coordination both within government and across government/private/non-profit partnerships.”

The biggest step in this direction was the creation in 2011 of NIH's National Center for Advancing Translational Sciences. The center's mission is to "speed the delivery of new drugs, diagnostics and medical devices to patients” by developing "innovations to reduce, remove or bypass costly and time-consuming bottlenecks” in the biomedical-research pipeline. The center is partly designed to facilitate collaboration with organizations outside the government.

For instance, one of the center's initiatives is the Therapeutics for Rare and Neglected Diseases program, which is designed to move promising therapeutics into human clinical trials.

The Obama administration has made significant progress in both parts of this progress. However, the big spending boost from the stimulus is over (and unlikely to be repeated in the current fiscal environment). Overall, the NIH base budget has not kept up with inflation compared to its level in 2009, and the administration asked for flat funding for fiscal year 2013. On balance, we rate this a Compromise.