Maggie Bartlett/NhgriA lab technician setting up a polymerase chain reaction at the National Institutes of Health Sequencing Center in May 2011.Two years after House Republicans threatened not to raise the government’s debt ceiling, the full brunt of that once-unthinkable offense is now hitting the National Institutes of Health. As Annie Lowrey reported in The Times this morning, 2013 has been the “darkest ever” year for the agency, because the budget cuts demanded by Republicans are taking a significant toll on research into medical cures.
One biomedical researcher whose budget was cut by 20 percent said science is falling behind, delaying promising results and discouraging young scientists, who are leaving the field.
The sequester — the direct result of the 2011 debt-ceiling fight — has had an immediate effect on the lives of people squeezed out of Head Start programs and public housing, on jobless workers whose benefits
were cut, and on government employees and contractors whose lower salaries and layoffs are dragging down the economic recovery. But it has also produced shock waves that will continue harming the country for years
to come, because researchers operate on long-term schedules and need a reliable stream of revenue to produce results.
The University of Chicago had to close three labs that treated cancer and gastro-intestinal diseases. George Mason University is laying off HIV researchers. Arkansas State University
is losing 30 scientists who developed techniques to detect bombs and nerve gas. In all, half the recipients of federal science funding are laying off researchers, according to the American Society for Biochemistry and Molecular Biology.
“The data shows that deep cuts to federal investments in research are tearing at the fabric of the nation’s scientific enterprise and have a minimal impact on overcoming our national debt and deficit problems,” Benjamin Corb, a spokesman for the biochemistry group, told CNN.
But rather than wake up and reverse this ruinous trend, Congress is preparing to keep it going, and possibly make it worse. At the moment, the stalemate on the 2014 federal budget between the House and Senate means that a continuing resolution — keeping spending at the impoverished sequester levels — is the most likely outcome. While Democrats want to replace the sequester with higher revenues and more reasonable cuts, House Republicans are demanding spending levels that are actually lower than the sequester.
And Speaker John Boehner is threatening yet another debt-ceiling fight, blithely ignoring the profound injuries he and his colleagues inflicted on the nation the last time.