NIH fellows, weighing a union, want a pay raise. Will that mean less money for grants?

Several thousand research fellows at the National Institutes of Health want to unionize, in large part because they want to raise their pay stipends to something resembling a living wage near the agency headquarters in Bethesda, Md. But with a Congress that is looking on in suspicion at the NIH’s research and a debt ceiling deal that limits budget increases, where is the money going to come from?

Unlike private companies, federal agencies can’t always just give raises. This varies widely across the government, and from position to position. NIH trainees actually have it better than most, because they aren’t subject to the rigid federal pay scale that governs how much most people working in the administration can make. That doesn’t mean, however, that there’s always money for raises. It’s Congress, not the NIH itself, that sets the agency’s budget.

Finding money for raises, therefore, necessarily means taking money from somewhere else, said Richard Freeman, a professor of economics at Harvard.

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