Ahead of his pompous closing commentary implicitly blaming President Trump and Elon Musk for ruining springtime, CBS Evening News Plus anchor John Dickerson created a new entry in the liberal media’s ever-expanding slate of reasons why Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) and the Trump administration’s wider push to shrink the size of government is bad: funding for public health studies.
As per the logic of Dickerson and Kasier Family Foundation (KFF) News editor/CBS News medical contributor Dr. Celine Gounder, the moves to shrink money doled out by National Institutes of Health (NIH) will cripple America’s ability to find cures for everything from Alzheimer’s to HIV/AIDS to even cancer.
“The Trump administration has targeted hundreds of medical research grants funded through the National Institutes of Health for reductions or outright elimination. It’s already having a ripple effect with research universities announcing staff cuts or stopping research on disease prevention and treatment altogether,” Dickerson ominously began.
Asked “how much medical research are we losing with these cuts,” Gounder said it’s “billions of dollars” as “the NIH budget is $48.6 billion a year at least currently and based on what we’ve already seen announced with more to come, we’re talking about billions of dollars in cuts, so this is significant.”
Gounder — who was part of the Biden transition team — cut to the chase and predicated areas that will struggle: “We’ve seen any number of areas being affected. So it could be HIV, it could be Alzheimer’s disease, autism, cardiovascular disease, cancer. So this is really not sparing any particular area of research.”
Dickerson had her move next to explain which schools were hardest hit. Notice how Gounder alluded to the defunding at Columbia, but didn’t state the why having to do with the rampant anti-Semitism inside the New York City school:
Three of the hardest hit across the country so far include Columbia, Johns Hopkins, and Penn, but this is really hitting institutions across the country in blue states, in red states, both. No one is spared from these cuts. At Columbia in particular, they are looking at $400 million in cuts. There’s been some negotiations. We’ll see what Columbia decides to do. And there’s many who are concerned about academic freedoms, free speech rights, etc., but some of what we’re looking at, at Columbia in particular are cuts to their Alzheimer’s disease program, which is one of the strongest in the country in that area. Cuts to their cancer center, as well as cuts to their HIV program and again, Columbia is one of the top institutions in all three of those areas.
Dickerson went full doomsday: “[T]his is the cutting-edge future of medicine when we’re talking about these kinds of studies, right? I mean, this is where America had such a lead in the world.”
Gounder explained that’s been the case since World War II when the Roosevelt and then Truman official Vannevar Bush “came out with this report saying, we need to put all this money into medical research, other kinds of scientific research, because that is going to be the engine for our economy and it worked tremendously well...and we are dismantling that infrastructure now.”
Ignoring the hundreds of billions in university endowments, the pair wondered how universities will be able to make payroll without tax dollars (click “expand”):
DICKERSON: How much do these institutions rely on this money, these grants?
GOUNDER: Yeah, NIH funding is really the backbone, financial backbone, to academic medical research centers and other institutions across the country. Without it, we would not have what we have today in terms of the biomedical research we’ve produced. We’re looking at 40 to 60 percent of major academic medical centers relying on — excuse me, 40 to 60 percent of their budgets is coming from NIH funding. So, you know, this is a huge, they’re highly dependent and that also makes them very vulnerable.
DICKERSON: Do they have a backup plan?
GOUNDER: That’s a great question. You know, there is the other percentage, you know, the other 40 to 60 percent of funding that comes from a combination of philanthropy, private sponsors, pharmaceutical companies. I know a lot of people are concerned about pharmaceutical company involvement in research and how that can lead to conflicts of interest. Look, we can’t have it both ways. If you want researchers to really be free to do the kinds of research they want to do, to have that independence and freedom of thought and creativity and be able to take risks, the NIH is what allows you to do that.
Gounder closed with what she viewed as drawbacks as corporate and private donations to scientific research: “Very often philanthropy has their own agenda. So it might be, I had a family member who had this disease, so I want to put money into that. It’s not necessarily spread out in a way that has any relationship to what people in the public are really suffering from.”
Goodness of one’s heart? Questionable ethics. But our hard-earned tax dollars doled out by bureaucrats? Just peachy!
To see the relevant CBS transcript from March 20, click here.
