Congress Blocks Trump’s Plan to Reduce Health Research Funding 🏥

Congress Rejects Trump Proposals to Cut Health Research Funds<br />“Indirect costs are very real costs,” said Dr. Landon S. King, the executive vice dean of the Johns<br />Hopkins University School of Medicine, and “there is not another source to pay for them.”<br />The Senate bill provides a 29 percent increase in funds for research on Alzheimer’s disease, bringing the total to $1.8 billion for next year.<br />Senator Roy Blunt, Republican of Missouri and the chairman of the subcommittee responsible for health spending, said it was the third consecutive<br />year in which he had secured a $2 billion increase for the agency, amounting to an increase of about 20 percent over three years.<br />“The spectacular increase provided by the Senate Appropriations Committee is amazing in the current fiscal environment,”<br />said Anthony J. Mazzaschi, a lobbyist at the Association of Schools and Programs of Public Health.<br />WASHINGTON — Back in March, when President Trump released the first draft of his budget proposal for the coming fiscal year, he asked lawmakers for deep cuts to one of their favorite institutions, the National Institutes of Health — part of a broad reordering of priorities, away from science<br />and social spending, toward defense and border security.<br />“The administration’s proposal would radically change the nature of the federal government’s relationship with the research community, abandoning the government’s long-established responsibility for underwriting much of the nation’s research infrastructure,<br />and jeopardizing biomedical research nationwide,” the Senate Appropriations Committee said in a report on its bill.<br />The Senate Appropriations Committee approved a bipartisan bill last week providing<br />$36.1 billion for the health institutes in the fiscal year that starts next month.