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Introduction
ORIGIN OF STUDY
In its conference report,1 the Consolidated Appropriations Act of 2017 directed the National Institutes of Health (NIH) to enter into a contract with the National Research Council’s2 Division on Engineering and Physical Sciences to conduct a study of the capital asset needs of the NIH Bethesda Campus. Legislators prefaced this request with the note that “The committee understands that federal agencies such as NIH need to maintain and upgrade parts of their physical infrastructure every year. The NIH facilities budget has been relatively flat since 2009. Over time, only the most essential maintenance and repairs for health and safety have been addressed, leaving an increasing backlog of projects requiring attention.” Legislators envisaged the study’s purpose as “to ensure the committee is informed of NIH’s critical facility needs and inform future infrastructure budgets.”
The primary tasks for the study as described by Congress were to provide the following:
Prepare a report that assesses the capital needs of NIH’s main campus. The report should identify facilities in greatest need of repair, describe the work needed to bring them up to current standards, and include cost estimates for each project. The Committee directs NIH to provide the report with its recommendations to the House and Senate Committees on Appropriations no later than 1 year from the date of the contract agreement on the statement of work between NIH and the National Research Council.3
The NIH Office of Research Facilities and the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine entered into a contract on September 30, 2017. The National Academies established the Committee on Assessing the Capital Needs of the National Institutes of Health, composed of diverse experts
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1 Senate Report 114-274: Departments of Labor, Health and Human Services, and Education, and Related Agencies Appropriation Bill, 2017 (Division H of the Consolidated Appropriations Act), pp. 111-112.
2 Effective July 1, 2015, the institution is called the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine. References in this report to the National Research Council are used in a historical context identifying programs prior to July 1.
3 Senate Report 114-274, p. 112.
in the fields of project management, civil engineering, major facilities and campus management, government administration, and medical sciences. Committee member biographical information is provided in Appendix B.
CHARGE TO THE COMMITTEE
Per the contract, the committee is charged with the following:
At the request of the Office of Research Facilities Development and Operations, National Institutes of Health, the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine will convene an ad hoc committee to: (1) identify facilities in greatest need of repair or those most impacting mission implementation; (2) assess the rationale and composition of projects to bring the NIH main campus facilities up to current standards or acceptable operational performance which meet mission objectives; (3) evaluate at a high level the completeness, accuracy, and relevance of cost estimates (already developed by/for NIH) for proposed capital projects; and (4) identify potential factors and approaches that the NIH should consider in developing a comprehensive capital strategy for its main campus portfolio of facilities. It is desired that the study identify approaches based on five (5), ten (10), and twenty (20) year prioritization outlook.
In addition, to better inform sustainment of NIH’s main campus and capital planning, the study committee shall review comparable available facility condition methodologies and metrics of other federal agencies at an overall portfolio level, and provide recommendations in determining the minimum levels of funding required to sustain NIH’s assets at an overall portfolio level.
COMMITTEE’S APPROACH TO THE STATEMENT OF TASK
While conducting this study, the committee members relied on their own expertise, information from publications they judged to be of high quality, and many interactions with officials at NIH, including directors of institutes and centers and the director of the Office of Research Facilities as well as officials from other federal agencies with responsibility for asset management (Appendix C). The director of NIH, the deputy director for management, and the deputy director for intramural research all spent time meeting with the committee.
The committee spent substantial amounts of time on the NIH Bethesda Campus, including inspecting the Clinical Center, the Porter Neuroscience Research Center, the animal vivarium (i.e., the Building 14/28 complex), the infrastructure core (combined utility plant, industrial water storage, and thermal energy storage tanks), and specialized laboratory spaces, including bioinformatics. The committee also toured the 130 acres that comprise the built environment of the 310-acre campus.
STRUCTURE OF THIS REPORT
The statement of task is addressed by the chapters as outlined in Table 1.1. To set the context for the preceding, Chapter 2 of this report describes the new and evolving biomedical research ecosystem and its implications for biomedical and health-related enterprises, including the NIH Bethesda Campus—described in more detail in Chapter 3—and especially for the physical built environment and infrastructure in which research is being conducted. Insofar as the built environment is costly and expected to be useable for many years or decades, it must be designed and constructed to be flexible and highly adaptable to meet changing scientific needs and purposes.
TABLE 1.1 How the Statement of Task Is Addressed in This Report
| Element of Statement of Task | Chapter(s) Addressing the Element |
|---|---|
| (1) Identify facilities in greatest need of repair or those most impacting mission implementation; | Chapter 4 |
| (2) Assess the rationale and composition of projects to bring the NIH main campus facilities up to current standards or acceptable operational performance which meet mission objectives; | Chapter 5 and Chapter 6 |
| (3) Evaluate at a high level the completeness, accuracy, and relevance of cost estimates (already developed by/for NIH) for proposed capital projects; | Chapter 6 |
| (4) Identify potential factors and approaches that NIH should consider in developing a comprehensive capital strategy for its main campus portfolio of facilities. It is desired that the study identify approaches based on five (5)-, ten (10)-, and twenty (20)-year prioritization outlook. | Chapter 7 and Chapter 8 |
| In addition, to better inform sustainment of NIH’s main campus and capital planning, the study committee shall review comparable available facility condition methodologies and metrics of other federal agencies at an overall portfolio level, and provide recommendations in determining the minimum levels of funding required to sustain NIH’s assets at an overall portfolio level. | Chapter 7 |
