Welcome to Debunker, a weekly breakdown of misleading (and sometimes flat-out wrong!) news from the worlds of science, health, and more—for Beast Inside members only.
Monday’s release of the Trump administration’s 2020 budget proposal included a nasty, if familiar, shot at science—a host of cuts that quickly had the scientific community and pro-science lawmakers up in arms.
What made the cuts puzzling was the fact that the administration has made vocal promises to promote certain areas of research and pour funding into advancing a few specific scientific endeavors. Instead, the proposed budget is rife with science-unfriendly proposals, and it also contains provisions that seem to fight against President Trump’s stated priorities.
Here are the three parts of the science budget that are slashed—despite stated efforts by the administration otherwise.
HIV Research
In his State of the Union address in February, Trump set a goal to “eliminate the HIV epidemic in the United States within 10 years.”
His budget, at first glance, reflects this goal: “It contains $291 million for an initiative specifically aimed at ending the HIV epidemic, run through the department of Health and Human Services.”
Upon a closer look, though, that $291 million isn’t all going to HIV/AIDS research: The budget request allocates $140 million of the $291 million to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), aimed at reducing new HIV infections through work with state and local health departments. It also sends $70 million in new funding to the Ryan White HIV/AIDS Program, which offers treatment and services for low-income and underserved individuals.
At the same time, the budget includes a fairly dramatic cut to PEPFAR, a program to send support for HIV/AIDS to other countries, and a cut of $769 million (approximately 14 percent) from the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, a part of the National Institutes of Health that provides research funding to study HIV along with many other diseases.
“We cannot be successful with this plan if we give with one hand and take from the other,” said Jeffrey Crowley, in an email. Crowley is the program director of Infectious Disease Initiatives at Georgetown Law School in Washington, D.C., and formerly served as the director of the White House Office of National AIDS Policy during the Obama Administration.
He said the proposed cuts to NIH are especially “problematic.” “NIAID is supporting critical research on broadly neutralizing antibodies and vaccine development that could lead to our next major HIV advance,” he said. “They are supporting the development of long-acting products for HIV treatment and prevention that hold the potential, within a few short years, to move us away from daily treatment to perhaps therapies that would only need to be dosed a few times a year.”
The administration also is continuing its crusade against Medicare and Medicaid, including almost $1.5 trillion taken from Medicaid over 10 years. That move deeply cuts into any effort to end the HIV/AIDS epidemic. In order to make a successful push to end the HIV/AIDS epidemic, Crowley said, “we need to get everyone in a stable system of care.”
Ending childhood cancer
In other areas of medicine, the budget proposal also includes “a new, dedicated effort to support research and develop new treatments for childhood cancer.” This would include $500 million spread over 10 years, with $50 million coming in 2020.
However, the budget lists a nearly-$900-million cut to the National Cancer Institute, a cut of almost 15 percent in the space of a single year. Redirecting a small chunk of a dramatically reduced budget might help kickstart some pediatric cancer research, but overall the country’s oncology research would undoubtedly suffer.
Climate Change
Another spot that doesn’t quite fit with the Administration’s stated priorities is ARPA-E, the Advanced Research Projects Agency-Energy. The budget proposal, as it has in previous years, involves completely eliminating this part of the Department of Energy (DOE), supposedly “to promote effective and efficient use of taxpayer funds.”
ARPA-E supports “high-potential, high-impact” technology ideas in the form of research grants and projects, and is considered by many to be an important part of the battle against climate change.
The Trump administration has expressed little interest in that battle. But it does like to tout innovation and technology as priorities, and eliminating one of the government’s primary ways to support innovation isn’t quite in line with that rhetoric.
“It’s a very effective agency, it’s specifically aimed at filling gaps that other parts of DOE and the government aren’t investing in,” said David Hart, a professor at George Mason University in Washington, D.C., and a director of the Center for Science, Technology, and Innovation Policy. “So it’s foolish to eliminate it.”
The budget proposal suggests ARPA-E’s work would be integrated into the DOE’s applied energy research programs, but Hart called that “misdirection.” It would be reasonable, he added, for the DOE to adopt some of the methods ARPA-E uses in managing its programs, “but that’s not the same as adopting their content… As far as I know, there is no sustained effort to make that happen.”
Hart also pointed out that Congress has completely ignored this request in the past, as it has with many of the more outlandish budget proposals that have emanated from the White House since 2017.
“It shows that the administration is increasingly out of sync with Congress, including Republicans,” he said, adding that congressional Republicans have begun to acknowledge the need to act on climate change but have focused on innovation and technology as appropriate versions of that action. “I’m hoping there is sort of a middle ground where everybody can say, ‘Hey we all agree we need this, and even if we can’t agree on regulations and taxes at least we can agree on R&D.’”
