In March, there was an enormous outcry to President Donald Trump’s budget blueprints that called for a 19 percent cut to NIH, among other healthcare spending proposals. A few months later, Trump’s more detailed budget has deeper cuts across a wider array of programs including the elimination of $839 billion from Medicaid. There was a strong reaction to the cuts, which threaten the progress of bipartisan legislation like the 21st Century Cures Act and the clinical research funding that supports jobs in many states.
Senate Democrat leader Chuck Schumer from New York referred to it as “a comic book villain-bad budget”
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.@APSPhysiology is proud to join @FundNIH and 300 orgs calling for $2B increase in #NIH funding in @Politico & @WSJ #TrumpBudget #FundNIH pic.twitter.com/CLdWCp9jVa
— APS Science Policy (@SciPolAPS) May 24, 2017
Even members of his own party were appalled, including conservatives from the Midwest.
“That proposal will not be well received in the Congress,” Missouri Senator Roy Blunt said. “I just don’t think you want to argue that we’re doing X — almost no matter what X is — as opposed to cancer research or Alzheimer’s research.”
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Senator Jerry Moran, a Kansas Republican who serves on the Senate Appropriations Committee, said reducing money for medical research “makes no sense.”
The American Medical Informatics Association issued a statement raising concerns about the far-reaching impact of budget cuts across the Office for National Coordinator for Health IT, which would lose more than one-third of its $60 million budget.
The impact of these cuts, if they are realized, will reverberate across our nation’s hospitals, universities, and other important sectors of the economy. The ecosystem that entices young scientists and clinicians to pursue their passion to help patients will be severely damaged, resulting in a downward spiral of innovation, delayed or forgone investment in new treatments, and a stagnant patchwork of IT-enabled patient care.
At a time when we should be acting on bipartisan agreements, such as passage of the 21st Century Cures Act or the Precision Medicine Initiative, and building on our nationwide investment in EHR adoption, this budget request stops progress in its tracks. Worse, this budget will imperil long-standing and important activities at the NIH, FDA and ONC intended to deliver new cures, safer treatments, and higher quality care for all Americans.
Dr. Tom Frieden, director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, also registered his outrage at the cuts on Twitter.
Admin proposal for CDC budget: risks Americans' health and safety: pic.twitter.com/jAVbeGyUOG
— Dr. Tom Frieden (@DrTomFrieden) May 23, 2017
Lawmakers made clear that once the were done the budget would look much different than the president’s proposals, as has been the case with prior administration proposals. Still, it’s breathtaking how many people Trump has managed to alienate with these cuts, from slashing Medicaid to NIH research grants, especially when it is done in part to support tax cuts for the wealthy.
