Recent NIH Budgets Do Not Support Scientists, Op-Ed Says
President Bush has said that the U.S. must provide adequate support for scientists and encourage children to enter the field, but the "administration's stingy NIH budgets over the past five years and its threat last week to veto the appropriations bill giving the NIH a small funding boost sound more like components of a Discourage Future Scientists Act," Gene Sperling, a senior fellow at the Center for American Progress, writes in a Washington Post opinion piece.
The NIH budget doubled from $8.9 billion in 1992 to $20.5 billion in 2001 and increased to $27 billion by 2003, but, after adjustment for inflation, the agency "has not gotten even a penny increase over the past four years," Sperling writes, adding, "The administration's fiscal 2008 budget would cut NIH funding by $250 million." In addition, although the "proposed budget in the House has only a small increase above inflation," Bush has threatened to veto "this modest gesture," according to Sperling.
He writes, "There is simply no policy that will inspire a new generation of scientists if current NIH funding trends are continued," adding, "The demoralization resulting from these cuts is already trickling down to our future scientists," and current scientists also "feel the squeeze."
According to Sperling, a "strategy of implicitly discouraging homegrown scientists could not be more illogical for our economic future, especially as more of the foreign-born scientists we have traditionally relied on are returning to their countries." He adds, "Shortchanging the NIH to compensate for the fiscal impact of tax cuts and rising defense and prescription drug spending is penny-wise and pound-foolish" (Sperling, Washington Post, 7/24).
