Appropriations Senators Retain Vertebrate Status

Even Susan Collins voted to fully fund NIH and CDC and give no money to MAHA

Bobby Morbillivirus reacts to MAHA’s rebuke with the face he makes when a child is fully vaccinated with the MMR and can’t die on his watch

One of the tactics that the Trump administration was hoping to employ in its war against the health of the American people was slashing the budget of the NIH and CDC. Previously the Trump administration sent a draft budget that slashed $18 billion from the NIH budget and cut the CDC by 50%. After watching the Senate confirm a parade of unqualified wellness grifters, anti-vaxxers, and lackeys to populate the Department of Health and Human Services, I was not optimistic about the Senate Draft Budget. Republican senators in particular have been particularly impotent, choosing to sit resolutely on their hands while the administration illegally impounds the HHS budget. I thought that America was on its way to eliminating federally funded scientific research altogether.

However, I will not complain about being pleasantly surprised. The Senate Appropriations committee passed a draft budget yesterday that resoundingly rejected this, maintained CDC funding levels, and gave the NIH a $400 million increase. This included most of the Republicans on the committee, who suddenly seem to have noticed that the cuts to NIH spending were actually going to wreak economic havoc on their states and get a lot of their constituents killed.

Even more encouraging, Appropriations’ bill blocked multi-year grant funding. This insidious scheme was designed to fund fewer grants without applying a budget cut. Currently, if you get a 5 year, $2.5 million grant that starts in February, you get $500,000 disbursed every February. This allows the NIH to fund the largest number of new grants each year. However, current NIH leadership does not want to fund grants at all. Unfortunately for OMB Director and All-Around Archetypal Evil Accounting Bureaucrat Russell Vought, the Constitution has not yet become so worthless that NIH Director Jay Bhattacharya can justify not funding already awarded grants at his patrons’ command. The idea behind multi-year funding is that the entire 5-year grant gets paid all at once.

Seems okay…grants are still getting funded. Isn’t that a good thing? It’s actually very bad: for every $2.5 million grant that would have previously been funded in $500,000 annual increments, there are now 4 other $2.5 million grants that won’t get funded because all of those year 1 annual disbursements are now encumbered on the one grant that got funded. Better luck next year if your lab can survive that long!

The Senate decided this was a terrible idea. Grant funding has already fallen dramatically due to Vought’s demands, filtered through DOGE, Bhattacharya, Principal Deputy Director Matthew Memoli, and imposed upon program officers at NIH. The funding cuts imposed to date have already sent our national capacity for conducting biomedical research into a precipitous decline; multi-year grant funding would cause it to crater.

NIH funding has taken a lot of critical hits, but multi-year funding will flatline it. Source: https://jeremymberg.github.io/jeremyberg.github.io/

Because I oppose funding useless agencies that are vehicles for pseudoscientific scamming on principle and I am also extremely petty, I was thrilled when HHS Secretary Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. did not get funding to create his flagship agency, the Administration for a Healthy America (AHA). In fact, my response was AHAHAHAHAHAHA. Kennedy’s plan was to downsize the NIH from 27 institutes and centers to just 8, to better focus on the chronic disease initiatives he favors. Why have an agency funded with tax dollars that focuses on developing ways to prevent or treat all of the many diseases that affect American health when Kennedy and his fellow kleptocrats aren’t able to profit from most of them?

If you are like me and would like our tax dollars to invest in better health for all Americans rather than supporting a worm-addled, anti-vax con man with the complexion of off-brand turkey jerky, you’ll be relieved to know that the Senate Appropriations committee agreed. They rejected Kennedy’s demand for funding to create AHA, as well as for reducing the number of institutes on the grounds that the budget was not the legal procedure for reorganizing any government agency and instead funded research on HIV vaccines, community health care, Alzheimer’s research, cancer, and all the legitimate medical conditions that NIH’s current organizational structure supports.

The draft budget still has to be passed by the entire Senate, then reconciled with the House budget, so the NIH and CDC are not out of danger yet. Even if this budget passes, Vought, Kennedy, and all the functionaries of the Trump dictator-making machine will assuredly have new strategies for administratively crippling NIH. DOGE will continue to apply their chainsaws where they can, regardless of the harm or impact, and Memoli will continue to rubber-stamp their efforts. Bhattacharya will continue his ongoing press tour, where he will feign scientific competence while spewing completely unsupported garbage about how research that even mentions diversity, equity, and inclusion is invalid, lab leaks, and public trust.

Even though the NIH is dying a death of a thousand cuts and will continue to take hits, small victories like this give me hope that we can still stop the bleeding. The damage already will take years to repair. Some is irreversible. My outlook for American science and health generally pretty grim, but I’ll take hope where I can get it. I am grateful to the Senate Appropriations Committee for having enough backbone to exercise their Constitutional duty to appropriate funds in the best interests of the Americans they represent.