Can Private Money Buy Public Science? Disease Group Lobbying and Federal Funding for Biomedical Research
研究罕见病倡导团体游说对美国国立卫生研究院（NIH）资助的影响，发现游说与国会“软 earmarks”相关，但仅影响不到三分之一的专项拨款，且可能具有信息传递作用，未必扭曲公共科学。
Private interest groups lobby politicians to influence public policy. However, little is known about how lobbying influences the policy decisions made by federal agencies. We study this through examining lobbying by advocacy groups associated with rare diseases for funding by the National Institutes of Health (NIH), the world’s largest funder of biomedical research. Disease group lobbying for NIH funding has been controversial, with critics alleging that it distorts public funding toward research on diseases backed by powerful groups. Our data reveal that lobbying is associated with higher political support, in the form of congressional “soft earmarks” for the diseases. Lobbying increases with disease burden and is more likely to be associated with changes in NIH funding for diseases with higher scientific opportunity, suggesting that it may have a useful informational role. Only special grant mechanisms that steer funding toward particular diseases, which comprise less than a third of the NIH’s grants, are related to earmarks. Thus, our results suggest that lobbying by private groups influences federal funding for biomedical research. However, the channels of political influence are subtle, affect a small portion of funding, and may not necessarily have a distortive effect on public science. This paper was accepted by Bruno Cassiman, business strategy.