President Trump, how will your proposed cuts to the National Institutes for Health impact public health?
The patient's entrance at the National Institutes of Health is shown in Bethesda, Maryland October 16, 2014.
Over President Donald Trump's first 100 days, we're asking him questions that our audience wants answers to. Join the project by tweeting this question to @realDonaldTrump with the hashtag #100Days100Qs.
#66. @realDonaldTrump, how will your proposed cuts to the National Institutes for Health impact public health? #100Days100Qs
“The goal of NIH research is to acquire new knowledge to help prevent, detect, diagnose, and treat disease and disability, from the rarest genetic disorder to the common cold,” according to the website of the National Institutes of Health.
But now the NIH is on the chopping block, with President Donald Trump targeting it as part of his budget proposal.
The NIH is made up of 27 separate institutes and centers. In 2016, it had a budget of about $32.3 billion to conduct medical research on behalf of the American people.
The NIH has helped support nearly 150 Nobel Prize winners and research that has “led to the development of MRI, [an] understanding of how viruses can cause cancer, insights into cholesterol control, and knowledge of how our brain processes visual information, among dozens of other advances,” the NIH website says.
Trump's plans for NIH has raised questions for a number of people, including Amy Catinia, a member of the PRI audience, who tweeted about it as part of our #100Days100Qs project.
According to a Tuesday report from the health news website STAT, Trump’s budget would cut $1.2 billion in funding for the NIH and “wipe $50 million from funding for IDeA grants, which are intended to help spread biomedical research geographically across the United States.”
Furthermore, STAT reports that the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention could see a cut of $314 million, and that grants administered by the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration would shrink by $100 million.
With that in mind, we’re wondering: Mr. President, how will your proposed cuts to the National Institutes for Health impact public health? If you’d like an answer to that question too, click here to ask the president in a tweet.