BUDGET/NIH/OBAMA/TRUMP AS PRESIDENT: “In a budget blueprint that promises to ‘make America great again,’ the Trump administration has proposed to cut $5.8 billion from the National Institutes of Health’s budget for fiscal year 2018, reducing its total spending to $25.9 billion. That would represent a roughly 20% decrease from its 2017 spending on biomedical research, which totaled $31.7 billion.
If approved, the proposed budget would reverse what has been a brief spurt in growth for the NIH after President Obama boosted its budget by $2 billion in 2016 and again in 2017.
Under President Trump’s proposal, NIH funding would lose almost as much ground in a single year as it did between 2003 and 2014, when inflation steadily eroded budgets that remained stagnant for a decade…
Dr. Georges C. Benjamin, who leads the American Public Health Assn., questioned whether Trump’s budget blueprint actually does put ‘America first.’
‘Americans already live shorter lives and suffer more health problems than our peers in other high-income countries,’ he said in a statement. ‘To become a healthier and more secure nation, we must invest in the health and safety of everyone, and not just in our military. Further cuts to the critical programs funded through discretionary health funding put us further away from this goal.’ “
-Melissa Healy, “20% cut to NIH budget would leave Americans more vulnerable to cancer and other diseases, experts warn,” The Los Angeles Times online, March 16, 2017