Via The Lancet Respiratory Medicine: Trump administration budget proposals ‘bad for health, science, environment, and America’. Excerpt:
The Trump administration's budget “blueprint” for 2018 proposes funding cuts to the National Institutes of Health (NIH), Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), and other agencies that would weaken air quality protections and hamper lung disease research, according to experts contacted by The Lancet Respiratory Medicine.
The proposals would be “bad for health, bad for science, bad for the environment, and bad for America”, according to a press release by the American Thoracic Society President David Gozal (University of Chicago, Chicago, IL, USA).
“The current proposed budget for NIH and many other agencies that are responsible for researching and regulating the quality of air we breathe is undoubtedly going to cause irreparable damage in the short-term as well as in the more distant future to all of us here in America, and around the world”, he told The Lancet Respiratory Medicine.
The White House's blueprint “really is a dramatic attempt to undermine the important role that the federal government plays in safeguarding Americans' health and safety”, agreed Paul G Billings (American Lung Association, Washington, DC, USA). “There is no way that any other source in the world can make up for that reduction in biomedical research at NIH.”
The NIH cuts are just part of the US$15 billion that would be stripped from the US Department of Health and Human Services, which also oversees the US Food & Drug Administration and Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). Overall, the White House blueprint would cut $54 billion from the federal budget for 2018.
The blueprint refers to new block grants for states that might be intended to replace programme-specific CDC funding for asthma, cancer control, and tobacco prevention, cessation, and education, Billings told The Lancet Respiratory Medicine, putting all such funds in “one big bucket for the states” that will “disappear into the ethers.”
Gozal urged “more responsible voices in Congress to restore sanity” to the federal budget. Damage to public health would result even if “only a fraction” of the proposed budget cuts are implemented by Congress, he alleged—and by discouraging young clinicians and scientists from joining the field, the proposed cuts could hamper research for years to come.
“When we talk about developing the next cure for lung disease, any impediment into the process will not only slow down innovation, but also turn away the next generation of intellectual capital—and that is a real crime”, he said.
