The Washington Post has a breakdown of the slash-and-burn budget proposal delivered to Congress on Tuesday by the White House. Called “A New Foundation for American Greatness,” besides being one of the more moronically named budget proposals in recent memory, it’s also an attack on scientific research for essential human endeavors like … living.
The National Cancer Institute would be hit with a $1 billion cut compared to its 2017 budget. The National Heart, Lung and Blood Institute would see a $575 million cut, and the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases would see a reduction of $838 million. The administration would cut the overall National Institutes of Health budget from $31.8 billion to $26 billion.
The National Science Foundation, which dispenses grants to a variety of scientific research endeavors, would be trimmed $776 million, an 11 percent cut. NSF had not been mentioned in the administration's earlier budget outline, the so-called "skinny budget," which was released in March.
According to Nature, the cuts to the National Institutes of Health would amount to an 18 percent drop in their budget.
The budget would eliminate the $70 million Fogarty International Center, which coordinates with other NIH institutes to train researchers and health-care providers overseas. The rest of the cuts would be spread evenly across the NIH’s 26 remaining institutes and centres.
The White House plan would create the US$272 million National Institute for Research on Safety and Quality. The institute would study the outcomes of treatments and health services, taking on the role of the independent Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality (AHRQ), which would be eliminated.
Because why would you want your health services to include safety? That’s some snowflake liberal Chinese conspiracy stuff—unsafe healthcare and undertrained healthcare providers builds character! The health community has been vocal about how catastrophic and inhumane this budget proposal is.
The proposed cuts to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention drew an unusually sharp rebuke from former CDC director Tom Frieden, who went on Twitter to describe the administration's CDC request as "unsafe at any level of enactment. Would increase illness, death, risks to Americans, and health care costs."
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Steven Houser, president of the American Heart Association, called Trump's budget "devastating" and "unconscionable." He urged Congress to boost funding for NIH by $2 billion rather than cut it by nearly $6 billion.
The Republican Party.