UAB Medical Center in Birmingham, AL (U.S. News & World Report)
The Trump administration's cuts to government funding, are putting biomedical research at risk and imperiling worldwide health. Benjamin Mueller, who covers the National Institutes of Health (NIH) for The New York Times (NYT), explains under the headline "President Trump's Cuts to Medical Research." At NYT's The Morning newsletter, Mueller writes:
The Trump administration stormed into office, loudly firing workers and closing diversity programs. But behind the scenes, it has also brought biomedical research to the brink of crisis by holding up much of the $47 billion the United States spends on the field every year.
The world’s leading medical labs can be found in the United States, and they rely on grants from the National Institutes of Health. The agency has stopped vetting future studies on cancer, Alzheimer’s, heart disease and other ailments. Trump aides have said they just need time to review spending their predecessors had promised, but it’s unclear what they’re looking for at the N.I.H. or when scholars can expect to start receiving money again.
In today’s newsletter, I’ll walk you through what happened — and why it matters.
A complex machine
Late last month, when the Trump administration froze government grants, a federal judge said it couldn’t just hold back money Congress had agreed to spend. But spending money at the N.I.H., which awards more than 60,000 grants per year, isn’t so simple.
That’s because new grants endure a tortured bureaucratic process. The agency has to notify the public of grant review meetings in The Federal Register, a government publication. Then scientists and N.I.H. officials meet to discuss the proposals. The problem is that the Trump administration banned those announcements “indefinitely.” So new research projects can’t get approved.
In effect, scientists say, the Trump administration is circumventing the court order. Health officials didn’t block research outright, but by shutting down the process, they’re still not spending much of the money Congress allocated to various research goals.
The administration has also proposed other big changes, saying that universities should bear more of the “indirect costs” of research: maintaining lab space, paying support staff. Trump aides say the changes would trim administrative bloat and free up more government money for research.
That forced laboratories on university campuses around the country, such as UAB in Birmingham, AL, to put many of their life-saving studies on hold. What's next? That is hard to answer with any certainty. But we do know this much: These are matters of life and death -- and this is an instance where reckless and incompetent actions by the Trump administration probably will cause people to die -- not only in the U.S. but around the world. The number of fatalities could dwarf the roughly 1.3 million U.S. deaths from the COVID pandemic, which was brought to you by the first Trump administration. What lies ahead? Mueller paints a decidedly grim picture -- a picture of which the general public probably is unaware, perhaps thinking, "Hey, Donald Trump is back in office, and he will make us great again! What could go wrong?" The answer is a lot, Mueller writes:
It’s hard to say how long the holdup will last. The Trump administration hasn’t submitted a single new grant review meeting to The Federal Register since a day after it took office. And even if it started adding new ones, the agency traditionally gives several weeks’ notice.
At risk are not only the tens of thousands of grants the N.I.H. awards each year, but also American dominance of biomedical research. Every dollar the agency spends on research generates more than two dollars in economic activity, the N.I.H. has said. Scores of patents follow. By some measures, the United States produces more influential health-sciences research than the next 10 leading countries combined.
The science unfolds across the country, including in red states (such as Alabama, Georgia, Florida, Tennessee, Louisiana, and Texas) where lawmakers have complained about proposed changes to indirect costs. Government-funded research (in blue and red states) can be a critical part of early-stage studies, often forging a path toward ground-breaking studies, before the private sector is even involved. Mueller writes:
Those findings often fuel pharmaceutical advancements, laying a foundation for drugs and vaccines long before private funders see such work as worth investing in.
Even Ozempic traces its roots back in part to work at the N.I.H on animal venom. Scientists found that the toxin from Gila monster lizards seemed to have particular physiological effects, helping lead eventually to one of the world’s most profitable and promising drugs.
New advances like those, scientists say, are in danger.
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