Yesterday, tens of thousands of people across the United States and the world marched in support of scientific research at the March for Science. This march took place almost exactly a month after President Trump revealed his budget request to Congress. Trump’s budget included startling cuts to nearly all scientific research agencies including the National Institutes of Health (NIH). The NIH is the largest biomedical research organization in the world. NIH directly employs over 5,000 of the world’s smartest biomedical researchers, and through scientific grants, is the backbone for biomedical research across the country. The graph on the left shows the operating budget of the NIH from 1994 to today (inflation adjusted), including the effect of the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act and Trump’s proposed $6+ billion cut. The negative consequences of Trump’s proposal are frankly hard to overstate. To start, there would be no funding available for new grants in fiscal year 2018. No money would be allocated to study healthcare quality. And a program vital to fostering international collaboration would be eliminated. As Kathy Hudson, a former deputy director at NIH put it to the American Association for the Advancement of Science, “The nation would lose research and researchers in a way that would not be recoverable.”
Data on the Rocks 