Trump's budget proposal eviscerates biomedical research, for no good reason

Donald Trump proposed a budget this week that will cut funding to NIH by nearly $6 billion, or 20% of its $31 billion budget. A cut of this magnitude would be devastating for biomedical research, and for the health of the nation.

This is colossally short-sighted, stupid, and even cruel. The U.S. budget this year is $4.0 trillion, which means that the entire NIH budget is only 0.75% of the budget. A 20% cut to NIH, while incredibly damaging to medical research, would only reduce expenditures by 0.15%.

Besides being shortsighted, this proposed cut is heartlessly cruel. What diseases, Mr. Trump, do you want people to die of? Should we halt research on aging? (Not a good idea for 70-year-olds like you.) How about cancer, or diabetes, or infections, or schizophrenia, or heart disease, or lung disease? Or maybe Trump wants to eliminate the NIH Children's Inn, where desperately ill children stay while receiving treatments. The list is very long; NIH supports work on 265 diseases and health conditions.

Everyone who is reading this either already benefits from medical research, or will some day.  Even if you are in perfect health, someone close to you probably uses a treatment that was supported by NIH. Virtually every major medical center in the United States depends on this funding. There are few investments with broader impact, and broader public support, than biomedical research.

For those who want to look at this from an economic perspective (as I explained in 2013), NIH funding is a terrific investment. A nonpartisan study in 2000 concluded that:

"Publicly funded research generates high rates of return to the economy, averaging 25 to 40 percent a year."

That's an amazingly good investment. The same report provided detailed examples showing how NIH-funded work saves billions of dollars per year in health care costs. But keep in mind that most of these benefits don't appear for many years. The private sector simply won't make such long-term investments.

On a more mundane level, NIH generates thousands of jobs in states all across the nation. If you want to see how it affects your state, check out this graphic from United for Medical Research. Do you live in Ohio? NIH directly supports over 11,000 jobs and $670M in funding, affecting 2,500 businesses in your state. Florida? Another 11,000 jobs, $520M in funding, and over 5,000 businesses. Texas? 21,000 jobs and over $1B in funding. And so on.

Does Congress want to kill NIH? I seriously doubt it. Does Donald Trump? I'm just speculating, but I think the ansswer is no. I think Trump doesn't understand what NIH does, but that someone in his inner circle–someone with a wildly distorted worldview–has inserted his own warped ideology into the President's budget proposal.

Finally, what's the motivation for these cuts? The U.S. economy is doing quite well, far better than it was in 2008 when Obama came into office. The economy then was in a devastating recession, but we didn't implement drastic cuts then, and we climbed out of it. We've had low unemployment and steady growth for years. It's not clear we need to cut the budget at all, much less make draconian cuts that would eviscerate and eliminate enormously beneficial programs. And if Trump wants to reduce spending, it makes no sense to cut programs that collectively only represent a tiny part of the total. One can only conclude that Trump's proposed budget cuts are entirely ideological, not financial.

Fortunately, budget making authority in the U.S. rests with Congress, not with the President. Let's hope that Congress will ignore this shortsighted, cruel, and pointless proposal to cut medical research to the bone, and instead will continue to invest in what is, for now, the strongest biomedical research community in the world.