One may agree or disagree with the Stimulus Bill and also the latest spending bill that passed Congress this week. However, they are the law of the land now and part of the good news is the increased spending will result in more money for the SBIR programs of a number of federal agencies.
Unfortunately there is one major exception, the $8.2 billion in new NIH research funding. NIH inserted obscure language in the rushed Stimulus Bill that exempted its increased R&D spending from the SBIR and STTR programs. The reason given by NIH for inserting this exemption is that the number of SBIR and STTR proposals has dropped off in recent years so additional SBIR/STTR money is not needed. They did not claim that they have funded all the good proposals received. And they did not claim that other R&D can get money into the economy faster than SBIR. And they did not claim that the innovations funded by SBIR are not valuable.
If you have an opinion on this please feel free to express it to your U.S. Senators and your Representative whose email address can be located at http://georgiainfo.galileo.usg.edu/gacongressdelegation.htm .