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Trump proposes to cut NIH Budget by $6 billion - around 20 per cent.

This is nothing short of disastrous. NIH is the largest source of biomedical research in the world. NIH scientists discovered the bacteria that causes Lyme disease. They demonstrated the effectiveness of the first drugs used to treat AIDS. The biomedical research enterprise in the United States is built on NIH as its foundation. Cutting that foundation by 18% will be catastrophic for human health.

In addition, more than 80% of NIH’s budget goes out the door to fund academic biomedical research, largely in the United States. How will researchers do their research? I guess they’ll have to do 18% less of it. But it won’t just affect those researchers’ salaries paid by their grants, or the purchase of equipment (I wonder what will happen to the businesses that supply that equipment?), or the training of doctoral and post doctoral students. It will affect American universities, research hospitals, and other research institutions.
.......
Whatever your political views or affiliations, whatever you think of the current Administration, if you want to protect research funding then you have to make your voice heard. Call your Representative today. Make sure he/she knows that you support NIH funding and ask him/her to do the same.
http://occupyme.net/2017/03/17/the-cut/ - Blog by Jennie Spotila
 

ash0787

Senior Member
Messages
308
we need to ask him personally the specific reasoning behind this.

All I could find by way of explanation is this
Mick Mulvaney, the director of the White House Office of Management and Budget, expanded slightly on the matter during a 16 March press briefing. “We think there’s been mission creep” at the NIH, he said. “We think they do things that are outside their core functions.”

I guess he got to produce those miraculous tax cuts somehow lol.
 
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It’s hard to imagine two diseases already struggling for funding faring well under Trump’s cuts and easy to imagine them faring worse than other diseases. It took over a year to convince 15 or so Institutes to band together to increase ME/CFS’s budget by a mere $6 million/year. As for fibromyalgia, it’s funding has decreased thirty percent over the past few years. It’s clearly very, very low on the NIH’s totem pole.
....
After 20 years of declining funding we got a one year reprieve. It’s ironic, tragic, unbelievable – pick the term you want – that the NIH budget is potentially getting whacked just as ME/CFS was finally getting off the ground. I, for one, don’t want to live through another multi-year drought in ME/CFS funding. I want to build our funding not watch it decrease.

We have to face the fact that we probably have a long term problem, that President Trump is probably going to hammer at the NIH’s budget for the next four years. The way to blunt that is to put aside party affiliations and push back against President Trump’s proposed cuts so strongly that he gives up trying to cut the NIH budget. This is not a partisan issue; it’s an ME/CFS and FM issue.

Because the Democrats will be utterly opposed to the budget (and won’t have a say in it anyway) saving the NIH will fall on the shoulders of the Republicans. Contacting Republican congressmen or women will make the most difference.
https://www.healthrising.org/blog/2017/03/18/trump-nih-budget-cuts-chronic-fatigue-fibromyalgia/
 

ebethc

Senior Member
Messages
1,901
Trump wants to immediately cut $1.2b from NIH (in ADDITION to 20% cut next year)

http://www.nbcnews.com/health/health-news/trump-proposes-slashing-medical-research-year-too-n739761

I'm trying hard to see the opportunity, e.g. the possibility that this will encourage a dramatic increase in private donations to research in the u.s. Ironically, if this happens then perhaps GOP belief that the free market will solve everything would be thwarted...that's because private donors are more likely to want credit for CURING disease vs a corporation that wants you to take their drugs forever!! (AI illnesses cost $120b per year in the US; cancer $$ is half that and at least a lot of ppl get over cancer)

@JaimeS
@Webdog
 

*GG*

senior member
Messages
6,389
Location
Concord, NH

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