All posts tagged "National Institutes Of Health"

White House officials clashed in the Oval Office over whether President Donald Trump should take a larger knife to the country's largest medical research agency.

According to reporting by The Washington Post, the dispute pitted White House budget director Russell Vought against Jay Bhattacharya, who leads the National Institutes of Health. Three people familiar with the feud told The Post that Vought accused the NIH of bankrolling "woke" initiatives that cut against Trump's agenda.

Vought argued ongoing spending clashed with a Trump executive order that bars "equity-related" grants and contracts, sources told The Post. Bhattacharya defended how his roughly $47 billion agency awards its money....

The Pentagon was caught attempting to divert funding for infectious-disease research to cover its own money woes, sparking outcry from a Democratic lawmaker.

According to reporting by Punchbowl News, Rep. Rosa DeLauro (D-CT) sounded the alarm on Thursday by revealing that the Department of Defense is trying to divert billions of dollars from the National Institutes of Health.

DeLauro, the top Democrat on the House Appropriations Committee, said that the Pentagon is trying to "siphon" money through an interagency agreement with the NIH. She warned the agreement could give the Pentagon access to billions that Congress appropriated to the NIH's institute for infectious disease research....

A professor with the Yale School of Public Health claimed that Donald Trump is "destroying a generation of knowledge" just like Mao Zedong did during China's Cultural Revolution.

Gregg Gonsalves wrote for The Nation, "What we are seeing is a purge—of the administrative state, of the universities, of expertise—that is consistent with events like the Cultural Revolution in China in the 1960s and ’70s, or the dismantling of the tsarist civil service after the Bolshevik Revolution in 1917."

He continued, "Just because this moment isn’t associated with the intense political bloodshed of those eras doesn’t make the comparison any less apt. In one way or another, the goal is to get rid of an entire set of people and institutions in the service of a radical ideology."...

The Trump administration's emphasis on right-wing ideology has had a chilling effect on life-saving medical research — and the researchers themselves — at the National Institutes of Health, according to a new opinion piece in Bloomburg.

NIH "is the largest source of funding for medical research in the world, creating hundreds of thousands of high-quality jobs," according to the government website. "More than 80% of its $48 billion budget" goes to to fund scientific research at universities and hospitals around the country.

But the website language may be changing now that DOGE has put a halt to NIH funding programs that "didn’t align with the administration’s political ideology," like "LGBT+ health, gender identity, diversity, equity and inclusion; vaccine hesitancy; and mRNA vaccines," the article said. ...

Each week that Republican politicians refuse to end the shutdown of the federal government results in 200 cancer patients being unable to enroll in treatment programs at the National Institutes of Health, 30 of them children. According to the Atlantic, the number came from a Wall Street Journal article with an interview with NIH director Francis Collins.