Congress already badly underfunded the cutting-edge research of the National Science Foundation in FY24. Are they coming for the life-saving research funded by the National Institutes of Health next?
Imagine a world where we still don’t have an effective COVID-19 vaccine. Imagine a world in which we don’t know how to test for a host of genetic diseases. And while you’re at it, imagine a world where we aren’t even aware that high cholesterol is one of the leading causes of heart disease.
I’ve asked you to picture an alternate reality that never happened – but, without nearly a century of robust federal funding for the National Institutes of Health (NIH), we would be living in that very world right now.
So the question is: What future reality do we want to inhabit? It’s up to us. We risk missing out on future health advances and innovations if we don’t fund the nation’s leading health-research agency today.
Congress created the NIH in 1930, pumping significant funding into the agency starting with the ramp-up to World War II. The research that NIH has conducted and supported – much of it in partnership with America’s leading research universities – has been absolutely crucial to Americans’ health and biomedical innovation ever since.
Simply put, this is because the NIH will fund the health and medical research that no other organization has the capacity or the will to do.
For instance, NIH supports the early-stage exploration of scientific questions long before there is any sense of what kind of commercial application the research might produce – or, even if a commercial application is apparent, it is so far in the distant future that no for-profit company will invest significant resources to pursue it. NIH helps ensure that promising possibilities like those are pursued, not dropped.
This is how we got the messenger RNA (mRNA) technology that led to the rapid creation of vaccines to tame the spread of the COVID-19 virus. This vaccine platform was developed through NIH-funded research that began more than half a century ago, and the resulting vaccines were only able to be brought to market in record time because of clinical trials that NIH helped coordinate.
Another crucial type of research for which NIH is indispensable is long-range studies of debilitating diseases like Alzheimer’s – again, something that is often not profitable for private companies to carry out. And the agency has persisted over the years on other incredibly valuable long-term projects to collect vast amounts of data and build knowledge about the human body and diseases that affect it. One of these long-term endeavors is the NIH’s Human Genome Project, which took more than two decades to complete. It essentially created the knowledge platform on which all human genetic science – and resulting drug therapies and biomedical innovation – has been built. We take this knowledge for granted now, and it has spawned numerous revolutionary breakthroughs, cures, treatments, and new discoveries – but it was only through the NIH that this foundational knowledge was created.
Federal investments in NIH over the years have not only been beneficial to our health, but also economically sound. For example, a recent study from United for Medical Research shows that a series of robust annual investments in NIH’s budget from FY15-FY22 led to major economic benefits for seven largely rural states where NIH spent nearly $1 billion supporting research through universities and other local institutions. That $1 billion expenditure, the study found, resulted in more than $2.2 billion in new economic activity, more than 14,000 jobs, and nearly $200 million in additional state tax and fee revenue for Alabama, Arkansas, Kentucky, Maine, Mississippi, New Hampshire, and West Virginia.
NIH research also provides a different economic benefit – by leading to new therapies that help the federal government save Medicare and Medicaid money it otherwise would have spent. One example is the NIH-supported Framingham Heart Study , which has tracked data on cardiac health since 1948. This long-running study resulted in the finding that high cholesterol is a major cause of heart disease – and the biomedical industry responded by creating cholesterol-lowering medications, which have reduced the incidence and severity of heart disease and reduced costly emergency room visits and hospitalizations due to heart attacks and other ailments.
But longtime supporters of NIH fear that ongoing partisan wrangling over the federal budget – which has already significantly affected other agencies that support groundbreaking research, including the National Science Foundation – may claim the NIH as an additional victim. Even a flat budget or punting to a continuing resolution would seriously endanger medical research. That’s because every year, inflation cuts into the amount that NIH can use to fund research and clinical drug trials.
What would get left on the chopping block with a flat or reduced budget for the agency? Would it be NIH Director Monica Bertagnolli’s effort to expand access to potentially life-saving cancer drug trials to more Americans in underserved rural areas? Or would NIH be forced to choose research into promising Alzheimer’s drugs over equally promising treatments for deadly brain cancers?
Particularly as America’s population ages and new global pandemics threaten, it would be unwise at best to cut some of the most valuable lifesaving research that the federal government supports. History has demonstrated that our nation’s health and economy benefit disproportionately from one of the safest bets in science: strong federal support for the NIH.