NIH Funding Cuts in the Trump Budget
The NIH is under the Department Health and Human Services. H&HS in the OMB’s “America First, Make America Great Again” Budget is scheduled for a 17.9% cut of $15.1 billion down to $69 billion. H&HS got the usual two pages in the skinny budget. The NIH budget is to be reduced $5.8 billion to $29.5 billion. Despite NIH being 43% of the H&HS in the skinny budget, it is only given one small paragraph in the write up.
The paragraph calls for a major reorganization of institutes to focus resources on the highest priority research and training. That is a mouth load of bureaucratese. The institutes are already organized by areas of physiological health and medicine, which was already determined by evolution or by God. You can’t mess with that. Also: consolidating the Agency for Healthcare and Quality within NIH. This evaluates medical procedures to find out which are useful. Rebalance federal funding to research. Hidden plans beneath this garbage, or just business school 1A?
The only institute spelled out in the NIH is the Fogarty International Center which trains medical people in foreign countries to do research on issues relevant to them. On their webpage, they cite Ebola research, and a family with Alzheimer’s that could lead to more understanding of this. Remember how Ebola dominated the news for weeks? Obviously, to Trumpians, this looked like a form of foreign aid. People have forgotten the fact that we are really not healthier than the poorest people on earth. The kicker: the Fogarty Institute budget is only $70 million, or 1/1,000 of the H&HS budget.
From the NIH.gov website: The NIH does $32.3 billion in medical research. 80% of their budget goes to 50,000 competitive grants to 300,000 researchers at 2,500 universities, medical schools, and research institutes, including every state. The straightforward 18% cut would nullify the research of about 54,000 medical researchers, and probably end the research careers of many of these very well educated doctors and medical technicians. The NIH uses 10% of its budget to fund 6,000 scientists in its own labs in Bethesda, Maryland.
I was going to list the NIH institutes that applied to myself and my family. Since that turned out to be almost all of them, I will just list all of the institutes. Most of them have already cojoined several medical areas.
• National Cancer Institute
• National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute
• National Institute of Dental and Craniofacial Research
• National Institute of Diabetes and Digestive and Kidney Disease
• National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke
• National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases
• National Institute of General Medical Sciences
• Eunice Kennedy Shriver National Institute of Child Health and Human Development
• National Eye Institute
• National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences
• National Institute on Aging
• National Institute of Arthritis and Musculoskeletal and Skin Diseases
• National Institute of Deafness and Other Communication Disorders
• National Institute of Nursing Research
• National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism
• National Institute on Drug Abuse
• National Institute on Mental Health
• National Human Genome Research Institute
• National Institute of Biomedical Imaging and Bioengineering
• National Center for Complementary and Integrative Health
• National Institute on Minority Health and Health Disparities
• John E. Fogarty International Center
• National Library of Medicine
• National Center for Advancing Translational Sciences
• Office of the Director
