This reads like post-hoc justification for what's going on, based on a tangled web of misconceptions about publicly funded medical research. The therapies in the article originated from government funded research that took decades to mature. "Huge swathes" of this kind of research are not plagued by reproducibility issues.
When anyone realizes that they’re spending too much money it is natural to go down the list of expenses and see which ones they can eliminate. That’s not a post–hoc justification, that’s avoiding bankruptcy.
Sure, as you say a lot of therapies had their origin in taxpayer–funded research. But that doesn’t mean that there is a _need_ for the taxpayer to fund research. It’s a luxury at best and a subsidy for companies that already earn billions at worst. The corporations that earn those gigantic profits don’t need taxpayer money to do the job when they have the billions they earn from their customers every year.
> When anyone realizes that they’re spending too much money it is natural to go down the list of expenses and see which ones they can eliminate.
No such realization happened. All that happened is that conservatives are lashing out against their perceived enemies and against those they see as easy target.
Also, the proposed budget bill represents will cause biggest deficit in a long time - and for years to come. If they were worried about affordability or deficit, that would not be happening.
> That’s not a post–hoc justification, that’s avoiding bankruptcy.
Let's be clear. Cutting NSF, NIH, and higher education funding has nothing to do with bankruptcy and everything to do with the gutting and dumbing down of the US with some retribution sprinkled in. In fact, these types of cuts will likely lead to increase costs in the medium/long term as the population ages with worse preventative medicine.
If avoiding bankruptcy was really the goal as you say, Trump would not be proposing to increase defense spending by 13% and further cutting taxes. So just stop with this bankrupt the country angle because it's BS.
And lets also go ahead and use some real numbers. The increase in defense spending is ~113B to over 1T while the cuts to NIH/NSF have totaled ~23B. In 2024 the total NSF/NIH budget was ~60B.
Forgive me, I was obviously not clear enough. knowaveragejoe said that my reasons for cutting this funding were a post–hoc rationalization. I tried to clarify that because our debt has been growing faster than our economy for a while now, _I_ am willing to put luxuries and subsidies on the chopping block. I don't know Trump’s motivations, or Congress’s. They are completely irrelevant to this discussion.
Personally I have no problem with Trump withdrawing funding from institutions that clearly, by their own actions and words, support antisemitism. I’d prefer he went further though.
Except NIH/NSF are not luxuries. They're investments with positives returns. If the goal is to address the debt, they are the wrong things to cut. First they are relatively small and second they generate positive economic output. In fact, the government should be adding investment into NIH/NSF.
That’s just the broken window fallacy writ large. The positive economic output of the research is counterbalanced by the negative economic output of the taxes paid. There are certainly worse things to spend tax money on, since there are things that generate no economic output at all, but that alone doesn’t justify it.
The fact is that taxpayer–funded medical research is just a subsidy for the pharmaceutical industry. Pharmaceutical companies rake in billions in income from their successful products and don’t really need any subsidies.
And you’re right, the NIH is relatively small. A back of the envelope calculation suggests that ending the NIH entirely would raise the cost of developing medicines by less than 10%. There’s no way that’s a crisis. That’s just a slightly different way of doing business.
