Here's $142M we'll be wasting on pseudoscience in the new US Budget

After much unnecessary drama and 6 months late, Congress finally passed a budget last week funding the government for the fiscal year that started in October 2017. While much of the news is good, or at least not too bad, the 2,232 page budget contains lots of goodies for special interests.

I downloaded the whole thing so you don't have to.

One of the worst pieces of wasteful spending is tucked away on page 934: $142,184,000 for the National Center for Complementary and Integrative Health. Incredibly, this is a 9% increase over the NCCIH's 2017 budget of $130.5 million. Is this because they've discovered new and effective treatments? Alas, no.

NIH has been spending money on so-called alternative medicine since 1992. Over the years, the budget has increased from just $2 million to the very hefty $142 million this year. NIH has now spent a total of $2.366 billion dollars on its alternative medicine center.

The NCCIH started as an "office," funded by a $2 million earmark by former Senator Tom Harkin, who later elevated it to a National Center called NCCAM. On Harkin's retirement in 2015, his buddies renamed it as NCCIH, adopting the buzzword "integrative" as a jazzier word than "alternative." It's a classic (and sad) example of how once something gets started by Congress, it grows relentlessly, creating its own constituency of people and industries who consume the funding and clamor incessantly for more.

What have we learned for our $2.4 billion? Have new cures been developed, new medicines been discovered? Has NIH provided good scientific evidence that any of the "alternative" methods–which include acupuncture, homeopathy, naturopathy, Ayurveda, therapeutic touch, reiki, aromatherapy, and others–actually work? The answer to all these questions is no.

On the other hand, the real work of biomedical research, funded by the rest of NIH, has yielded tremendous progress on a wide range of diseases. These include cures that we could only have dreamed about 10 or 20 years ago, such as this amazing stem cell cure of a 7-year-old boy with a devastating skin disorder, or this leukemia treatment reported in 2013.

After 26 years and $2.3 billion spent trying–and failing–to prove that alternative medicine works, it's long past time to end this nonsense and shut down NCCIH, as I and many other scientists have been saying for years. That $142 million could be used far more effectively studying real treatments for real diseases, rather than imaginary treatments that have failed, time and again, to prove their merits.

$142 million. To those who argue that it's only a small percentage of the NIH budget, I would point out that a typical NIH research grant is under $500K. This means we could fund at least 300 additional biomedical research projects every year if we got rid of this giant special-interest earmark that has utterly failed to produce anything useful.

Instead, someone in Congress managed to sneak in the largest budget increase that NCCIH has seen in 15 years. What a waste.

Starving science: a petty, shortsighted national "strategy"

This image taken approximately 438 miles above the earth's

surface provides a spectacular view of the Lena Delta in

Russia. Image courtesy of the U.S. Geological Survey, whose

 images are all in the public domain.

150 years ago, passenger pigeons were so numerous that they could black out the sky when their flocks passed overhead. The last passenger pigeon, a female named Martha, died in the Cinncinnati Zoo in 1914. All we have left of this species are specimens held in museum collections.

One of the most extensive collections of animal specimens in the world is managed by a tiny unit of the U.S. Geological Survey, called the Biological Survey Unit. A small group of curators maintains a collection of more than one million animals collected over the past 130 years by scientists and ordinary citizens across the U.S.

Now, for reasons that are at best mysterious, the USGS is planning to eliminate the Biological Survey Unit. The BSU has a very small budget, a mere $1.6 million out of the USGS's budget of $1.1 billion, and an even tinier fraction of the country's $4.4 trillion budget.

What the heck are they thinking? Shutting down the Biological Survey Unit won't save enough money in the vast government budget to even be noticed, but the loss of its precious collections will reverberate through the decades. Does someone in the USGS or the Department of the Interior have a grudge against the BSU? Or are they just petty?

The BSU's collection resides in the Smithsonian Museum of Natural History, one of the great museums of its type in the world. The collection contains some 370,000 birds, 300,000 mammals, and 390,000 amphibians and reptiles, many of them dating back to the late 19th century. These specimens represent a unique view back in time, illustrating the natural history of our continent and the animals that have lived on it over the years.

It's only through collections like this that scientists can understand how human activities have affected our natural world. For example, historical collections of eggs from wild birds allowed scientists to document the thinning of eggshells caused by the pesticide DDT, which was made famous by Rachel Carson's book Silent Spring.

Just a few weeks ago, the presidents of three of the leading animal science societies in the U.S. wrote a letter to Science magazine pleading for the USGS to continue funding its Biological Survey Unit. So far, the USGS has not responded to them.

Museum collections may not be as flashy as some areas science (perhaps we need a new Indiana Jones movie to raise their profile), but that doesn't mean they are not critically important to our understanding of the natural world. Once the BSU disappears, it's not coming back: the curators will retire or find other jobs, and the collection will become inaccessible, even if it still exists somewhere in the bowels of the Smithsonian.

The plan to shutdown the Biological Survey Unit seems indicative of a larger trend of neglecting investment in our future. It may reflect a particular form of neglect by the USGS, as pointed out by Cynthia Ramotnik in a 2015 article. It also reflects the severe cut to the USGS budget proposed by Donald Trump last month: he requested a total budget of $860 million, which represents a 20% cut from the current year's budget of $1.08 billion. But in the case of the BSU, the budget impact is so small that it seems worse than neglectful to cut it: it is shortsighted and petty.

When asked by the Washington Post, former House speaker (and current Trump enthusiast) Newt Gingrich admitted that the cutting the BSU's $1.6 million budget wouldn't matter to the larger budget, but he then went on to comment, “if this collection is that valuable, there are probably 20 billionaires that could endow it.”

Great: let's hand over our national resources to billionaires, and if they're not interested, well, it must be that the resources weren't that valuable in the first place. Not.

This is ridiculous. We're still a rich country, and we shouldn't be eliminating projects like the Biological Survey Unit just to give a massive tax cut to rich people, or just to make a point about budget cutting, or whatever the reason that the USGS and the Department of the Interior might offer. (The USGS hasn't responded to my inquiries.) Maintaining our museum collections not only shows respect for the thousands of people who built them over the years, but it benefits the countless scientists, educators, school children, and others who will learn from these collections in the future.