May 23, 2017
By Alex Keown, BioSpace.com Breaking News Staff
WSASHINGTON – President Donald Trump’s 2018 budget proposal takes a machete to the spending plans of nationally funded health programs that fund medical research, disease prevention and insurance plans.
The Trump administration released its spending proposal for the Department of Health and Human Services on Monday, hours ahead of today’s planned release.
In the budget proposal, the administration is hacking away at what it has suggested unnecessary spending, particularly in the National Institutes of Health. Those cuts include a $1 billion cut to the National Cancer Institute, a $575 million cut to the National Heart, Lung and Blood Institute and an $838 million cut to the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, according to the Washington Post. All told, cuts to the NIH total just under $6 billion.
The 10 year budget proposal for HHS makes even steeper cuts, slashing $636 billion over the next decade, Modern Healthcare said.
The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention is also facing steep cuts in the proposal, including an $82 million cut to funding for vaccine-preventable illnesses and respiratory diseases. The budget also cuts $186 million from CDC programs aimed at HIV/AIDS prevention and hepatitis research and prevention. Another cut to the CDC is $222 million to the CDC’s chronic disease prevention programs, the Post said. The CDC will also see a 17 percent cut to its global health programs that allow the U.S. to monitor and respond to disease outbreaks across the globe.
Tom Frieden, the former director of the CDC, took to social media to excoriate the president’s proposal. On Twitter, Frieden said the budget proposal “risks Americans’ health and safety.” He posted a long note that outlined ways the proposal would be detrimental, including an elimination of federal funding for skin and colon cancer prevention programs, as well as cuts to HIV, STD and tuberculosis prevention programs.
“Proposed CDC budget: unsafe at any level of enactment. Would increase illness, death, risks to Americans, and health care costs,” Frieden posted on Twitter late Monday night.
Current CDC director Anne Schuchat has not posted a reaction on Twitter to the proposal.
The Trump administration first outlined its budget proposals for HHS and the National Institutes of Health earlier this year, but a Congressional budget plan struck earlier this month that avoided a government shutdown ignored those proposals and actually increased funding to various departments, including the NIH. The bipartisan budget plan provided a $2 billion increase for the NIH, the largest budget boost it has seen in more than 10 years. But, that increase is only temporary and is not part of the 2018 budget.
In addition to cuts at the CDC, the Food and Drug Administration’s budget will be cut from $2.74 billion to $1.898 billion. To offset some of those cuts, the White House is proposing an increase of regulatory fees paid by drug and medical device manufacturers. Those fees are expected to generate an additional $1 billion for the FDA.
In addition to Frieden, other officials from both sides of the political aisle have already criticized the budget proposal. Sen. Lamar Alexander, a Republican from Tennessee, who chairs the Senate’s health committee, said the proposed fee increase at the FDA will not have support in Congress. Endpoints noted that Alexander said the current fee price was negotiated over a period of two years and will not be able to be renegotiated.
