CHAPEL HILL (January 23, 2025) – With Donald Trump’s return to the presidency, the National Institutes of Health are “in the crosshairs“ for budget cuts, declared NPR.
That could take a significant toll in the Research Triangle, where UNC-Chapel Hill, NC State and Duke together receive more than $2 billion a year in federal research funds.1
Those dollars don’t just fuel discoveries to benefit mankind; they also generate economic ripple effects. Research has found each dollar spent by NIH generates $2.50 to $8 in economic activity.
Yet Robert F. Kennedy Jr., Trump’s nominee for Health and Human Services Secretary, which oversees NIH, says he wants to replace 600 of the agency’s 20,000 employees and shift research away from infectious diseases and vaccines.2
BUT IN THE accompanying video, UNC-Chapel Hill Chancellor Lee Roberts eloquently explains the value of research at Carolina, which now exceeds $1.2 billion a year.
“It’s hard to overstate the importance of research to our enterprise here,” Roberts says.
“It’s not an exaggeration to say we are in the top tier of research institutions globally, and the impact of that for the state of North Carolina and the world as a whole is difficult to overstate as well….
“What we’re doing in the classroom is teaching students things they didn’t know before. What our researchers are doing are discovering things that nobody ever knew before.”
THE SCIENTIFIC and medical communities are already gearing up to resist efforts to reduce the agency’s budget.
“Why would you want to dismantle an institute that is the leading research institute in the world?” Ellie Dehoney, a senior vice president at Research!America, a nonprofit that advocates for scientific research, told NPR. “…There’s no reason to take a successful institution and dismantle it.”
People in the medical community are “deeply, deeply concerned,” said Dr. George Daley, Dean of Harvard Medical School. “Any restructuring that would lead to an overall decrease in the support for medical research could really have a devastating effect.”
Dr. Elias Zerhouni, who ran NIH from 2002 to 2008 under President George W. Bush, told NPR that the “crown jewel” of NIH is its independent peer review process.
“It’s going to be more political than it needs to be and (than) it should be. You want it to be above politics. It’s one of those things that we need to protect from political influence, Zerhouni said.3
SAFETY MEASURES taken during the Covid pandemic deepened right-wing distrust of science, of course.
But as Republican former Gov. Jim Martin recently pointed out, you should pay more attention to what Trump does than what he says.4
Trump tried to cut NIH’s budget during his first term as president. In 2017, he proposed a 22% reduction in the agency’s budget.
But NIH research dollars flow to both Democratic and Republican states.
And in the end, Congress rejected the White House’s proposal and instead increased NIH’s budget by $3 billion, or 8.3%, to $37 billion. The increase included funds for Alzheimer’s disease research and translational science. And Trump signed the bill.
It was the largest increase in federal research funding in a decade.5
1 https://www.npr.org/2024/11/12/nx-s1-5183014/trump-election-2024-nih-rfk.
2 https://www.propublica.org/article/nih-niaid-trump-kennedy-bhattacharya-vaccines-research.
3 https://www.npr.org/2024/11/12/nx-s1-5183014/trump-election-2024-nih-rfk.
4 https://www.newsobserver.com/opinion/article297750533.html.
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