The Trump administration plans to slash more than $4 billion in medical research, because who wants to cure diseases when sick people cough up so much money? Well, according to a new poll from Civiqs for Daily Kos, it turns out that voters really want the government to fund that kind of research.
The poll, which was fielded from Feb. 28 to March 3, finds that 61% of registered voters oppose the federal government reducing funding for medical research. That includes voters in every age demographic as well as those in urban, suburban, and rural areas.
Nine out of 10 Democratic voters oppose such cuts, as do 58% of independent voters and 1 in 3 Republican voters (34%).
In fact, only 52% of Republicans support such cuts, which is a fairly weak showing given that cutting government spending is what their party is supposedly all about. Less than 1 in 3 voters overall (31%) support cutting government funding for medical research.
Curiously, 13% of Republicans are “unsure” about reducing this funding, compared with only 1% of Democrats and 7% of independents who are unsure. That suggests Republicans are having a hard time weighing their dislike of deadly illnesses against their hatred of government spending and general distrust of science.
Trump and Musk’s planned slashing of research funding would come from capping the amount that the National Institutes of Health, the nation’s chief agency for biomedical and public health research, grants for “indirect” costs at 15%, down from an average of around 28%, according to Axios. However, some institutions receive reimbursements of well over 50%, including the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, which has a negotiated rate of 55%.
“Indirect” costs cover things like support staff, disposal of hazardous waste, and maintaining facilities. And as with so many other expenditures, the funding has already been granted to institutions, despite Trump and Musk’s attempts to rip it away.
While a federal judge has temporarily blocked those cuts, that hasn’t stopped universities from preparing for the worst.
The University of Pennsylvania is already reducing graduate admissions. A neurologist at the University of Iowa who treats and researches Parkinson’s told the Associated Press the cuts will cost his university and its hospital tens of millions of dollars, in addition to lost jobs.
"[Those cuts] would be really bad for our work," said Donald Milton, a doctor at the University of Maryland who studies respiratory viruses. His university would see its indirect-cost rate slashed from roughly 56% to 15%. "It would slow us down,” he added. “It may prevent us from continuing the work in the longer run."
Even if these proposed cuts don’t instantly harm public health, they arrive with remarkably horrible timing. The nation is currently facing a massive outbreak of avian flu, which has led to egg rationing and severely inflated prices at the grocery store. And Texas and New Mexico are dealing with an outbreak of measles, which has led to the country's first death from the preventable illness since 2015. The measles outbreak is serious enough that even Robert F. Kennedy Jr., the infamously anti-vaccine health secretary, had to pen an op-ed for Fox News telling folks to get vaccinated.
If enacted, the cuts to medical research would cause deeper pain as well. One economic analysis shared with Axios estimates the planned cuts would result in the loss of more than 46,000 jobs and $6.1 billion out of the nation’s gross domestic product.
Worse, it’s very possible that these planned NIH cuts are only the beginning. Musk’s lackeys at the so-called Department of Government Efficiency reportedly now have access to NIH's sensitive payments system. And we’ve seen what’s happened at other agencies when Musk’s tech boys get their sweaty fingers on the purse strings.
Musk and Trump are not only playing with fire on public and economic health, but given how unpopular the cuts are, they’re also playing with their own political futures. The public has already started to reject their administration, and a major public backlash can’t come soon enough—you know, while there’s still time to stop the next pandemic.
Campaign Action
