Why wait? Trump mounts an early raid on NIH’s ’17 budget in search of some spending money

Chanelle Case Bor­den, PhD, a post­doc­toral fel­low in the Na­tional Can­cer In­sti­tute’s Ex­per­i­men­tal Im­munol­ogy Branch, check­ing DNA gel. Gel elec­trophore­sis is a method for sep­a­ra­tion and analy­sis of macro­mol­e­cules (DNA, RNA and pro­teins) and their frag­ments, based on their size and charge. Daniel Sone / Na­tional Can­cer In­sti­tute 

Pres­i­dent Trump is look­ing for some extra cash this year. And to get it he’s ready to start slash­ing NIH fund­ing now, rather than wait until the next bud­get year gets started.

Ac­cord­ing to doc­u­ments mak­ing the cir­cuit in DC yes­ter­day, Trump wants to cut $1.2 bil­lion out of NIH re­search spend­ing. And the full $18 bil­lion he’s look­ing for in­cludes a $40 mil­lion hit at the FDA, ac­cord­ing to a re­port in Bloomberg, where the pres­i­dent would pre­fer to slow hir­ing in ex­change for some fast spend­ing money.

The new Trump bud­get for 2018 has al­ready set out a pro­posal to carve out $5.8 bil­lion in fund­ing at the NIH, which is en­joy­ing its first sig­nif­i­cant bud­get in­crease in years after a bi­par­ti­san group of law­mak­ers joined hands on the ini­tia­tive.

Trump clearly would like to shift re­search and non-de­fense spend­ing to pay for some of his cam­paign promises around bor­der se­cu­rity. But these cuts are not pop­u­lar among law­mak­ers. In bio­pharma, where the NIH seeds the drug re­search of the fu­ture, along with a con­sid­er­able amount of trans­la­tional work, it’s anath­ema.

John Crow­ley, the CEO of Am­i­cus and a guest of honor—with his daugh­ter Megan—at Trump’s re­cent ad­dress to Con­gress, told Axios:

For me as an en­tre­pre­neur, it’s all about in­ven­tions and heal­ing, and I think NIH plays a cru­cial role. It’s part of this vir­tu­ous cir­cle that it nec­es­sary to ad­vance med­i­cines to pa­tients, which also in­cludes the grants that NIH pro­vides to our aca­d­e­mic in­sti­tu­tions. Our uni­ver­sity re­search sys­tem is the core for basic sci­ence and basic trans­la­tional re­search and is the basis for a lot of the good ideas that come into a com­pany like ours.

The con­tro­versy has al­ready in­spired the launch of one new lob­by­ing group, the Coali­tion to Save NIH fund­ing, and a num­ber of law­mak­ers in both par­ties say that the cuts are a non­starter.

That said, with the fail­ure of Trump­care and the prospect of a new scrap over tax re­form, it’s hard to de­ter­mine who’s run­ning the shop in Wash­ing­ton these days.

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