And It Begins...President Trump Looks to Cut $1.2 Billion of NIH R&D Spending This Year

And It Begins...President Trump Looks to Cut $1.2 Billion of NIH R&D Spending This Year March 29, 2017
By Mark Terry, BioSpace.com Breaking News Staff

Additional details about the Trump budget have been released, and it looks like there are plans to slash $1.2 billion out of research spending for the National Institutes of Health (NIH). The overall budget cuts Trump is planning hit $18 billion.

The NIH cuts include $40 million out of the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA), $50 million from a program designed to more evenly spread out biomedical research among the 50 states, and $300 million from a worldwide HIV/AIDS program known as PEPFAR. Bloomberg writes, “The savings would be found by slowing the rate of new patients put on treatment and reducing support to ‘low-performing countries.’ States also would face a $50 million cut that would target ‘less effective HIV research and prevention activities.’”

As part of the budget, the Trump administration has proposed cuts for biomedical research at the NIH by $5.8 billion in the 2018 fiscal year, or approximately 18 percent below 2017 levels. The Office of Management and Budget referred to the change as “a major reorganization of NIH’s institutes and centers to help focus resources on the highest priority research and training activities.”

The budget for the Department of Health and Human Services for 2018 is $65.1 billion, down from $84.6 billion in 2016.

Additional cuts include $50 million from the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA), $350 million from research grants at the National Science Foundation for biology, information science and engineering, and $372 million from the Low-Income Home Energy Assistance Program.

Tom Price, the new Secretary of Health and Human Services, defended the cuts, saying the NIH budget is filled with unnecessary expenses. “Our goal is to fashion a budget that focuses on the things that work, that tries to decrease the areas where there are either duplications or redundancies or waste, and whether indeed we can get a larger return for the American taxpayer.”

The Trump budget proposal plans cuts for almost everything, excluding Veterans Affairs, Homeland Security and Defense. The VA would get a 4.4 percent increase, and Homeland Security’s budget would jump 2.8 percent.

Health and Human Services gets a 12.6 percent decrease, the largest cuts, percentage-wise. The other largest cuts include state and other development programs, reduced by 10.9 percent, and education, by 9.2 percent.

Stat News noted that Price’s “remarks came a day after reports that the administration had proposed an additional $1.2 billion cut to the NIH for the current fiscal year, on top of a suggested $5.8 billion cut for 2018. The NIH’s 2016 budget totaled $32.3 billion.”

Price suggested that it could cut NIH funds to universities that covers “overhead” like lab equipment and utilities, which, he said, would allow the agency to direct more funds to actual research—an odd statement, if you consider the unlikelihood of conducting research without electricity, water or laboratory equipment.

Representative Tom Cole of Oklahoma, a Republican who chairs the House appropriations committee, told STAT bluntly, “Not going to happen.”

Cole also said on MSNBC’s “Morning Joe,” “I don’t favor cutting NIH or Centers for Disease Control. You’re more likely to die in a pandemic than a terrorist attack, and so that’s part of the defense of the country as well. So these in my view are cuts that are very short-sighted. These are investments the country ought to be making.”

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