Oh, I know the NIH investigator pay scales are huge. It's really hard to get a lab there unless you're super-established, well-respected, and sort of a field household name. I hear some stuff through the grapevine from a relative who works on the 'other side' in extramural grants. It's also pretty hard to get a tenure-track job right now. My 2012 supervisor has been a postdoc for like seven years.
It takes some real major justification and long-time work to justify that huge of a salary in your grant package. Here's a table of average salaries by field and rank. The average for a full professor in biomedical sciences - FULL - is about half that. Also NIH's paylines are shit. There's a guy named Yuntao Wu - brilliant HIV investigator, mentioned in the textbook of the HIV class I took last summer - who is basically preparing to move to China because his money went down the crapper, last I heard. (He may have changed his plans. I don't know. He's still in the United States.) Relative in NIH grants says that handwringing and complaining is de rigueur in Bethesda these days.