Posted on 03/16/2017 4:00:55 PM PDT by Olog-hai
Although the details are scarce, President Donald Trump’s proposed budget, America First: A Budget Blueprint to Make America Great Again, paints a dramatic picture for the American science and medical communities that is facing huge potential budget cuts.
If it’s been a while since you’ve had a civics class, the Constitution states that it’s Congress that gets to decide how to spend the government’s money and how to tax its citizens, so this proposal is not the final word on what goes and what stays. But a President essentially starts the conversation, and for many scientists, it’s not a happy topic.
The National Institutes of Health budget would be cut by $5.8 billion, meaning it would lose about 20%. The Environmental Protection Agency would face $2.6 billion in cuts, that’s 31% of the agency’s budget. The Department of Energy would lose $900 million, or about 20% of its budget. Health and Human Services would see a $15.1 billion or 18% budget cut; as part of that, it shifts costs to industry from the Food and Drug Administration budget. The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration would face an 18% budget cut. …
(Excerpt) Read more at cnn.com ...
Good!
How about another cut....make NBC pay taxes. Is cnn exempt too? That was a gift to nbc by obama.
Lol! As if any of those agencies had anything to do with science.
NIH could be cut 20% or more and not affect real science funding.
Tom Price and Fracis Collins (if he remains) need to jettison all the social engineering, Obamacare-supporting “research” (mainly doing surveys) and my guess is even with a 20% cut there’d be more for real scientific research than under Obama.
I have witnessed, both from the inside and outside, government fraud, waste, and abuse for the last 47 years.
It’s time, starting with LBJ’s “Great Society”.
what!?! no more grants to run shrimps on hamster mills? the horror.
These “research” science agencies do not want to find a cure for some diseases, they state they want to manage certain diseases such as cancer. Think what would happen it someone discovered a CURE and preventive for cancer. What would happen financially to the medical industry... treatment centers, hospitals, testing agencies... and what would we do with all the living people. How long have we been giving to cancer research?
“There are about 70,000 people employed at the main NIH campus in Bethesda, maryland (THE Freak state). Can you name anything they have done to significantly advance medicine? Just askin’.”
Nada, Zippo, Nothing!
20,000 not 70,000
Still, I’m sure there is plenty of cutting that needs to be done. Most of their budget goes to funding external researchers (academia), and there must be plenty of fluff.
Somehow I don’t think a society burdened with abortion bloodguilt (never mind the other sins unrepented of) is going to get a cure for cancer even if big government is swept out of the way here.
1. This will force something badly needed - setting priorities as to which science/medical/grants/projects/programs ought most to be funded.
2. Carrying that out and doing a good job of prioritizing will require new leadership and not just at the heads of the agencies, but in officials/managers underneath them. Without a moratorium on federal civil service rules regarding letting people go, there will be too much institutional kick-back giving bad information/opinion/analysis from “managers” within the agencies and the priorities will not get corrected right.
There is not one disease called “cancer”; rather, the word “cancer” refers to over 100 diseases that share some similarities. A single cure for cancer is impossible. In order to come up with cures for cancer, each type of cancer must be understood at the most fundamental level and then various approaches to treatment must be tested.
From the outside, medical research might look like it should be easy and straightforward. In reality, it is not. Every little tidbit of new knowledge comes only after years of painstaking work. One question in my own field of work arose in 1976, and only now is there even a hint of an answer to it. And it will take many more years of research to figure it out.
If scientific research were easy and straightforward, we’d already know everything, and people like me would be in different lines of work.
Doc44 PhD Biological Sciences (human histology)
If you have a PhD in a life science, then why are you repeating the conspiracies about how cancer cures are suppressed in the name of profit? Excuse me, but you should know better.
exDemMom, Ph.D. Biochemistry and Molecular Biology
Should have thought about that before you took all that taxpayer money to lie about global warming and work against the interests of those very taxpayers. Whores. Cry me a river. Live on THAT money for the rest of your miserable life.
Besides, did it occur to this idiot writer that research doesn’t need to be paid for by the government?
It is good, gut it, take out what’s unimportant, political largesse. I Bet a straight cross the board cut of 15% - by agency, not program would be manageable by people with business sense rather than byzantine bureaucracy. People who know how to find the fraud and abuse is.
There was that movie, the Secret of Nihm.
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