Steve Milloy
Contributor
The US is by far the world’s leading funder of biomedical research. But the Trump administration reportedly plans to ask Congress to cut the budget of the National Institutes of Health from $47 billion to $27 billion as part of its effort to rein in out-of-control federal spending.
Not unexpectedly, grant recipients and their support communities are up in arms. They claim that the proposed cuts would deprive researchers of the funding they need to find cures. They say the US will lose its global dominance in the field, along with enormous profits.
But the critical questions are: “What does NIH-funded research actually accomplish?” and “Are the accomplishments worth the money?” The answers, at least according to NIH itself, seem to be shockingly little for the vast sums spent. (RELATED: STEVE MILLOY: Trump’s EPA Is Right To Be Skeptical Of ‘Sun-Blocking’)
On its website, NIH divides its accomplishments for 2024 under three headings: (1) “Human Health Advances”; (2) “Promising Medical Findings” and (3) “Basic Research Insights.” Under each heading are five NIH-touted accomplishments.
The first item listed under “Human Health Advances,” a category that represents the latest and greatest from NIH research, is “Accurate blood test for Alzheimer’s disease.” After listening to a leftist talking head attack President Trump and Elon Musk for “setting back Alzheimer’s research 20 years” with funding cuts, I looked into the Alzheimer’s advance that NIH had touted at the top of its list of accomplishments.
The advance referred to a July 2024 study published in the Journal of the American Medical Association reporting on a new blood test that had, with 90 percent accuracy, correctly diagnosed Alzheimer’s among 1,213 Swedish Alzheimer’s patients.
While that may sound impressive, the study authors qualified their results with two key caveats: (1) More testing was needed in other cohorts of patients to confirm their results; and (2) “Future studies should evaluate how the use of blood tests for these biomarkers influences clinical care.” Far from being a “Human Health Advance”, the researchers admitted that they still needed confirmation of their results and that they’re not sure the blood test will have any usefulness even if the results are confirmed.
As to NIH taking credit for the “advance,” such as it is, NIH was just one of 20 different funders of the research. It awarded a total of $993,478 to two Swedish researchers. The other 14 Swedish researchers on the study were apparently funded by the other 19 or so Swedish funders.
The study is really only noteworthy because NIH anointed it as the top “advance” for 2024. But what does that say about the other $36.8 billion NIH spent on 60,000 other grants? A not-ready-for-prime-time Alzheimer’s blood test is its pride and joy among all that funding?
A recent Washington Post op-ed entitled “Science needs more shrimp on treadmills” opined that “the National Institutes of Health isn’t funding too much silly science. It’s not funding enough.” The author tried to credit NIH with the development of weight loss drugs like Ozempic. In 1984, an itinerant NIH researcher published a study on Gila monster venom. After four decades of research elsewhere, others used the finding to develop the now blockbuster GLP-1 drugs. In some ways, that’s an amazing story. On the other hand, it’s not evidence that NIH’s huge spending is producing results for taxpayers.
President Nixon launched the “War on Cancer” in 1971, Every President since has tried to make his mark in that effort, but breakthroughs have limited. In 1986, all-star biostatistician John Bailar observed that cancer remained undefeated. In 2018, cancer researchers reported in the British Medical Journal that the expensive drugs recommended by US cancer treatment guidelines were based on “weak evidence.” President Biden’s “Cancer Moonshot” has produced essentially zero.
NIH mentioned no cancer progress under “Human Health Advances” or “Promising Medical Findings” for 2024. The sole mention of cancer comes in “Basic Research Insights” under “Mapping how cancers form and spread.” Fifty-four years after the War on Cancer was launched, that is where we are.
None of this is to say that NIH shouldn’t fund medical research. But if NIH continues spending taxpayer money, there must be some auditing of expenditures and reconciling of accomplishments. We are $36 trillion in debt and cannot afford to spent never-ending billions of dollars on non-productive research in hopes that something will eventually turn up.
And no, there is no need to worry about foreign competition. We spend about 18 times more than the UK, our nearest competitor with respect to medical research. It may be that the rest of the world is free-riding on the backs of US taxpayers. It may also be that the rest of world has realized that there are more productive ways to spend their taxpayer dollars.
Steve Milloy is a biostatistician and lawyer, publishes JunkScience.com and is on X @JunkScience.
The views and opinions expressed in this commentary are those of the author and do not reflect the official position of the Daily Caller News Foundation.
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Researchers have known for decades that D3 causes apoptosis in cancer cells. Why is no refinement of this research being done?
What makes you think no refinement of this research is being done?
Or that it has flamed out when the research was refined? Not every promising new tidbit goes anywhere.
There is clear and recent evidence that an inadequate level of circulating (1,25(OH)2D) has serous consequences for people who contract COVID-19. The finding also highlighted that the NIH recommended intake level of Vit D was completely inadequate for proper health. People given (1,25(OH)2D) when they were sick with COVID made remarkable recoveries. This went unrecognized and even suppressed by, you guessed it, the NIH.
They appear to seek techno-treatments more than cures, especially simple, effective and inexpensive ones. No wonder they fret about “profits” from undiscovered drugs. That’s where their retirement incomes arise.
Cutting their budget by $20 billion and changing the management might produce far more benefit in the sort, medium and long term. Why are so many people getting rid of their bowel cancer with Ivermectin, Fenbendazole and Vitamin D? I have one post-chemo cousin who should have died long ago from lung cancer who is using this treatment.
I honestly think there needs to be an overthrow of the dominant paradigm for government funding. Rank amateurs are doing a better job than the NIH it seems, in mission after mission, while continually persecuted by the formal sector. This is fundamentally wrong. All around me people are paying privately for health maintenance and treatment by nutritionists, naturopaths, massage therapists and chiropractors. We only visit “doctors” because they have a hammerlock on the prescription pads.
Since you seem to be so concerned about expenditures and our $36T debt, resume you’re opposed to the $120 billion increase the President is asking for in the 2026 budget?
No question. It’s difficult to reduce debt by spending more.
Perhaps you can connect the two. It’s entirely possible that some budget items need to be increased and others decreased. Or are you claiming that all budget items are equally worthwhile / worthless?
He’s calling for a very large increase in military spending.
Good; long overdue.
Maybe military should fight cancer, not climate change 🙂
Increased military spending is always required after a Democrat has been president.
Trump had to raise the defense budget after Obama-Biden left office because they left the military in such bad shape, and now Trump has to increase the military budget after the Biden administration for the very same reason.
Democrats are detrimental to military readiness and national security because they are delusional and don’t operate in the Real World. When the adults take over, they have to raise the military budget.
Needs a line-by-line appraisal to determine which expenditures are questionably over-funded / unnecessary.
For example, if big hits in 2026 are say one-time redundancy payouts to significantly reduce the size of ongoing public service payrolls, a few $billion spent next year might pay back much more over the next 5 years.
Well by the look of what DOGE is finding there’s the separation packages and prosecutions to run as well as getting the public circus up to pace with IT so any POTUS Congress or Senate can get the quick answers they want on behalf of taxpayers. So $120bill seems cheap in the big scheme of things and it is capital investment for long term returns.
I don’t know the exact percentage of the US debt that has arisen from “off budget” expenditures, but it is huge.
None of Biden’s “Inflation Reduction Act” or Trump/Biden’s COVID spending was on budget – but collectively it was more money spent (in same year dollars) as the US spent in World War 2. The tune is easily 10% or more of the existing deficit from that alone.
Then there is the tens of billions in cash sent to Ukraine…
If Trump increases the nominal budget but switches focus from DEI and climate change nonsense to things which actually help the American economy and American people, that’s fine by me.
If he can minimize this extra spendind – that’s good too.
And another issue is “overhead” by the universities diverted to pay assistant deputy deans of diversity in the Women’s Studies department.
Spoken as someone who has no idea what they’re talking about.
Since you infer that you do know, please explain.
Your implication is that this is generally how those $ are spent. At my instiution and every one that I know of, they are used to provide support to researchers in the departments holding the grants, and to pay other administrative costs associated with funded activities.
According to recent revelations, only about 30% of the money goes to fund researchers, the rest goes to fund the management, including DEI managers.
I chaired a smallish research consortium and the researchers were professors and their students. Only 30% of the grant went to the university. The research team basically got a few small labs and offices – much less than the 30% going to the university. The rest just disappeared. Note that most universities charge more than this one.
Spoken as someone who has no facts to back up his blather.
I remember reading an interview with a representative from Orphan Diseases in the Journal Science a few years back. She was asked why don’t you get the universities to do work on them. She said oh no we need big pharma/biotech to do it they get the job done. Recently a number of faculty were suing Tufts U., Tufts had reduced their salaries for failing to bring in research grants equal to half their annual salaries. There numerous articles and recently a book written on the very poor reproducibility of biomedical research. Need I say more
By and large, and I do mean large, Americans have been turned into experimental pigs to be harvested for their healthcare (and sometimes deathcare) dollars.
The US is by far the world’s leading funder of biomedical research.
Not to mention gain of function. But don’t worry, as far as Auntie is concerned he’s an hero…
The Life Scientific.
Anthony Fauci on a medical career navigating pandemics and presidents https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m002bhwk
Alternatively, there are the documented & referenced revelations about Fauci’s career in this book –
https://www.amazon.com/s?k=robert+f+kennedy+jr+the+real+anthony+fauci
I have read (no link) that 75% of peer-reviewed medical reports cannot be replicated. For psychology / psychiatry, it’s 90%. For woke studies, it’s 100%.
There’s a lot of fat to cut.
SR:
Your % may be a little high but the implication is sound: there is too much bad research. And in relation to Milloy’s nice article, we are funding way too much lousy “science”.but the trick will be to somehow discern the difference.
Here is a link to a nice review article on the replication problem. Enjoy!
https://www.nas.org/reports/the-irreproducibility-crisis-of-modern-science/full-report
I believe the problem is easily solved: get the government out of science.
If some damn fool wants to subsidize phrenology with his own money, and some university wants to be the recipient and scotch their own reputation, and students want to waste their own money taking the classes, fine with me. But stop using my taxes to teach and subsidize racism and child mutilation.
I just read through the preface; so well put. While it somewhat falls under the guise of “reproducibility”, I would add the issue of “ir-predicability” (I know, not a real word). All the climate science forecasts of gloom and doom are exhibit #1 in this regard: if the IPCC, Al Gore, Michael Mann, and all the other climate dooms-dayers actually understand the full inner workings of earth’s climate, then they’d be able to predict with fairly good accuracy what man’s contribution to climate will cause. So far they’re not even close; it is obvious they don’t have a clue, don’t care that they don’t have a clue, and are using climate science for their own agenda. I wish more of the public understood this concept; it would end the AGW agenda practically overnight.
You can also contrast and compare the productivity and innovation of the private sector against the any or all of the government controlled organisations. My favorite example is Bell Labs who were wonderfully productive and innovative, until, of course, the government, in its infinite wisdom, broke up the organisation into Baby Bells.
Indeed, you can make a case that the US innovation industry (and hence much of the world’s) emanated from the US private sector. That’s why taxes should be as small as possible, so that more money can be used by the private sector for useful purposes, to the benefit of all, and not just the research organization itself.
Government funding tends to be a money mill directed to self preservation of the recipient organisation. They are skilled in pulling at emotional heart strings by claiming that they are on the cusp of a major breakthrough in the fight against cancer, climate change, or such like. On the other hand, the private sector has to perform or perish.
My favorite example compares Samuel Pierpont Langley’s “Great Aerodrome,” designed to be a manned, powered flight machine, that failed to take off and sank in the Potomac River.In October 1903. Compare this with the Wright brothers successful flight. Langley received a vast grant while the Wright Brothers used their own resources.
Another example from the UK was the fate of the government built R101 which had a fatal crash on its maiden flight. The privately built R100 made a safe journey across the Atlantic only to be forcibly decommissioned by a embarrassed and vengeful government. How dare a private firm be successful when an all powerful government wasn’t!
Also, conducting research projects too far in advance of the current knowledge base and the state technology is extremely expensive, and not that productive. Look at the race to the moon for an example. This, and the Vietnam war, nearly beggared the US and forced draconian financial action by a President who was somewhat unfairly forced out of office. But declaring the aim of your research is to be the first to get to the moon or cure cancer is compelling attractive to naive governments.
And as eptly done as Mercury/Gemini/Apollo were, it was way too expensive for the result and led nowhere. The Space Shuttle was a pork project from the git-go and ended up costing more per launch than the expendables it was supposed to replace, not to mention destroying two out of 5 shuttles and killing their crews. The space station was so useless that NASA cut its crew down to the minimum of three, and it’s done nowhere near enough research to justify its cost. NASA was horrified at the idea of tourists paying their own money to visit, and I have vague memories of several movie companies being rejected. I also have vague memories that the thing was so useless that NASA’s official plans were to de-orbit it as soon as it was built, but I’ve not been able to find any references confirming that.
Every time I see some report that the latest Mars crawler has found evidence for water, I put it down to amping up the publicity for some vote in Congress.
There is a whole lot of government which could be cut. One of my favorite examples of inept inefficiency is this report on meat inspectors from 2012 (https://reason.com/2012/06/30/the-sickening-nature-of-many-food-safety/):
Wikipedia reports that both R100 and R101 were government funded.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/R100
The novelist that you might know as Neville Shute was actually the aeronautical engineer Neville Shute Norway and worked on the R100 project.
You can find a lot more about that in his autobiography “Slide Rule”
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nevil_Shute
First thing that came to mind was NIH decided to fund some gain of function research on an obscure bat virus at a little-known lab in Wuhan China. Little did they know that this would put them on the map and release a pandemic.
Research funding has to be generous if a nation is serious about scientific and engineering discoveries and breakthroughs
By it’s nature, most of the research effort will be wasted, but the idea is that a small percentage will yield the breakthroughs
That said, the generosity can be exploited for personal gain if the system becomes corrupted
This is precisely what has happened. It is not exclusive to medical science research, but the problem is most acute in this area
Financial incentives become the main driver. Not for pharma, for which this is obviously the case, but for the researchers
Too many see only a well trodden path to personal financial success via claims of breakthrough drugs, clinical trials and eventual launch or selling off the IP
Add to this the cushy relationship with big pharma through consultancy, shares and side projects
This is part of a wider malaise in which science has lost its way. Funding has become the only real measure of success for universities in the US, UK and other countries.
In this sort of environment, scholarship dies because it is not valued. Funding used to be for the sole purpose of conducting research that was of interest to the scientist, with possible future applications or just to answer fundamental questions
Now funding is for the sake of promotion and glory. The research is secondary, even tertiary – the concern of the PhD or postdoc with ambitions of securing a permanent position
Scientists by and large are no longer scholars, they very often have limited technical knowledge. They simply ride the crest of the latest wave, whatever is in fashion, jumping from one to another seamlessly by proposing bullshit ideas with all the right buzzwords but no understanding whatsoever of what they actually mean
Restructure funding so that universities do not have to rely on the overheads. Provide more structural funding to a select elite of universities and tell the rest to focus on teaching or shut them down
Stop using university as a kindergarten, slash student numbers to 10% max, have solid vocational training options and make universities places of serious scholarship once again
Of course, this will not happen. What we’re currently seeing in the US and even more in the UK is a ‘course correction’
They’re being put on a diet, forced to shrink by 20-25%. In the end, however, things will carry on pretty much as usual
The gangrenous rot and waste go deep. This is not a mere course correction.
Listen to Dr. Jordan Peterson as he lays out the picture of higher education and research:
Btw, I have worked in higher education administration for over 23 years, and our organization, while not perfect, is one of the best. Yet I observe across the broader U.S. higher education and research landscape that Dr. Peterson’s views are right on target.
Publish or perish.
In the 70s it became clear that colleges and universities were expanding to keep high school graduates from entering the work force.
The toilet salesman: Now it can be shown that smarter kids come from homes with 2 toilets rather than 1 so howsabout a third for brighter kids maam?
Parkinson’s Disease Linked to Living Near Golf Courses—New Study
Shock horror with that Trump guy and send more grants.