Even the Threat of Budget Cuts Can Hurt American Science

["Dave Farber" <farber () gmail com>]

Begin forwarded message:

> From: Dewayne Hendricks <dewayne () warpspeed com>
> Date: June 1, 2017 at 2:48:38 AM EDT
> To: Multiple recipients of Dewayne-Net <dewayne-net () warpspeed com>
> Subject: [Dewayne-Net] Even the Threat of Budget Cuts Can Hurt American Science
> Reply-To: dewayne-net () warpspeed com
>
> Even the Threat of Budget Cuts Can Hurt American Science 
> A climate of uncertainty leaves the National Institutes of Health unable to plan for the future.
> By Ed Yong
> May 31 2017
> <https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2017/05/even-the-threat-of-cuts-can-hurt-american-science/528615/>
>
> If the White House has its way, in 2018, 5.8 billion dollars will disappear from the budget of the National 
> Institutes of Health—the largest funder of biomedical research in the U.S. That cut, which was revealed as part of 
> President Trump’s budget proposal last Tuesday, represents 18 percent of the NIH’s budget. It has been described as 
> “a significant blow to medical research” that would “set off a lost generation in American science.”
>
> It’s also unlikely to actually happen.
>
> “Presidential budgets are a statement of presidential priorities but Congress makes the decision—and there’s strong 
> bipartisan support for the NIH,” says Tom Cole, a Republican congressman from Oklahoma, and chair of the House 
> subcommittee that oversees the NIH’s budget. That support was evident earlier this month, when Congress totally 
> ignored Trump’s proposal to slice $1.2 billion from the NIH for fiscal year 2017, and instead awarded the agency an 
> extra $2 billion. “This is the second year in a row that NIH has received a substantial increase, and the intention 
> of Congress is that that continue,” says Cole.
>
> A $2 billion windfall is clearly better than a $1.2 billion shortfall, but that extra bolus of money is not the 
> obvious bonanza that it seems. Congress may be holding back the Trump administration’s desire to cut funding for 
> scientific research, but the threat of such cuts still looms. And in that atmosphere of uncertainty, it’s hard for 
> agencies like the NIH to work out how to effectively channel money into research.
>
> The problem is that good science takes time. Projects can take years to come to fruition, which is why the NIH only 
> ever awards grants for two to five years—never just one. And the money for, say, a three-year grant isn’t doled out 
> in one fell swoop. Instead, it’s allocated on a yearly basis, which means that it’s highly susceptible to fluctuating 
> budgets. Imagine that the NIH commits all of its extra $2 billion for 2017 to new three-year grants. If the agency is 
> hit by a $5.8 billion cut in 2018 or 2019, those new grants would wither. Researchers would have to stop their work, 
> and fire newly-hired staff. That $2 billion would effectively have been thrown away.
>
> The agency can’t reserve the money for future years, either. All of it has to be spent within fiscal year 2017, which 
> ends on September 30th. This means that when NIH staff heard about the extra $2 billion at the start of May, they had 
> only five months to work out how to spend it all. “It’s chaos figuring out how to move this money,” a source at the 
> agency tells me. It could go towards new equipment, supplemental funding for existing grantees, or bridge funding to 
> tide established scientists over between grants. “But it’s just small chunks here and there,” the source says. 
> “There’s no way we could fund a full project.”
>
> One could argue that this is a lot of ungrateful hand-wringing. They did, after all, get more money. And as Cole has 
> said, and as Congress has signaled, Trump’s drastic cuts may never materialize. But that’s no reason for complacency, 
> argues Harold Varmus, a Nobel laureate who was NIH director from 1993 to 1999. “Most of us think that Congressional 
> appropriators, happily fond of NIH, will not allow the cuts to happen,” he says. “Still, it would be foolish to 
> assume that we will be saved without an effort to defend ourselves.”
>
> [snip]
>
> Dewayne-Net RSS Feed: <http://dewaynenet.wordpress.com/feed/>



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