Senate committee rejects Trump proposal for NIH budget cuts, restructuring

A top priority of President Donald Trump’s administration is the identification and elimination of wasteful, unnecessary, fraudulent, and abusive spending of taxpayer dollars, and no part of the federal government is immune from such budget cuts, including the National Institutes of Health.

Not everybody is on board with that effort, however, as the Senate Appropriations Committee, including most of its Republican members, just voted overwhelmingly to reject Trump’s proposed funding cuts and reforms to the NIH, according to The Hill.

In fact, the Senate panel advanced a measure that would actually increase the NIH’s budget rather than slash it, and included language that would seemingly prevent the administration from moving forward with its plans to consolidate and restructure the collection of health agencies.

Senators reject proposal

The White House Office of Management and Budget previously submitted to Congress a proposal to substantially reduce NIH funding by around $18 billion, or about 40% of its budget.

The OMB proposal further called for a significant revamping of how NIH distributes grant funding to universities, medical schools, and other institutions for research, as well as to consolidate the agency’s 27 separate institutes into just eight entities.

Yet, the Senate Appropriations Committee voted 26-3 this week to advance a measure that, rather than cut NIH funding, increased the agency’s budget by approximately $400 million. The bill also rejected the administration’s restructuring plans and, in an apparent rebuke of prior funding freezes and possible future recissions requests, explicitly earmarked hundreds of millions of additional taxpayer dollars for specific research purposes and recipients.

“This committee has had multiple hearings over the last several months and heard from patients, families and researchers about the importance of NIH funding,” Sen. Tammy Baldwin (D-WI) said after the bill was advanced. “This committee has, in a bipartisan manner, prioritized NIH and the research it supports to develop life-saving treatments and cures for devastating diseases.”

Committee Vice Chair Sen. Patty Murray said, “To the scientists wondering if there will even be an NIH by the end of this administration: this committee’s resounding message is yes,” and added, “Congress has your back — we’re not going to give up the fight against cancer, Alzheimer’s, or rare diseases.”

Misinterpretation results in brief funding freeze

The Senate committee’s vote came just one day after ABC News reported on widespread “confusion” at NIH on Tuesday after an OMB memo’s footnote was misinterpreted — perhaps intentionally — to suggest that the Trump administration had imposed a broad freeze on roughly $15 billion in research grant funding for the remainder of the fiscal year.

Per The Hill, that confusion was seized upon by committee Democrats like Sen. Murray, who indignantly declared during the hearing, “One footnote, from an unelected bureaucrat — overruling Congress and even NIH, to block $15 billion in funding for things like cancer research.”

She also accused OMB of attempting to encroach upon the legislative branch’s appropriations authority and of not being forthcoming about planned cuts, freezes, and temporary withholdings of funds, and said, “Right now, they are illegally hiding apportionments data that would let us know whether funds we passed are being spent as intended and help us strengthen the bills we are in the middle of writing on. It is absurd we have to mark up bills, while being kept in the dark.”

NIH funds quickly unfrozen

Except, as Politico reported, the White House moved swiftly to clear up the misunderstanding about the OMB memo footnote within hours of the initial uproar from the NIH and elected officials.

The funding freeze was only temporary and part of “a programmatic review” of federal spending, according to an OMB spokesperson. Democrats refused to accept that, though, as Sen. Murray proclaimed on Tuesday, “This administration is lying about waste, fraud, and abuse at NIH to justify attacking medical research.”

That said, OMB Director Russ Vought recently confirmed in a weekend interview that NIH was due for a “dramatic overhaul” of its spending and structure, and said, “We’re going to have to go line by line to make sure the NIH is funded properly.”

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