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It would be sad if true, but it isn't true. The 2025 budget, which funded on a continuing resolution until September, made no cuts to the NIH budget. It is exactly the same as 2024. There are cuts proposed for the 2026 budget, but that's all still being negotiated. Things like the fight with Harvard affect Harvard, but most research in most places continues.
I don't think we should exaggerate - "pausing meaningful work indefinitely" is an exaggeration - but the Trump administration has already definitely decimated biological research country-wide in a manner we have not seen in our lifetime. This is the biggest story among scientists in the country right now.
The upcoming 2026 budget will be its own battle, but what has already happened in 2025 is devastating. The budget is there, as you point out, but it is not being spent. It's worth pointing out this is all being sued in at least a dozen or so lawsuits, and is likely to be found highly illegal in most forms, but the damage has already been done, and the administration will find new creative ways to get around court orders.
Please see: https://jeremymberg.github.io/jeremyberg.github.io/index.htm... https://grant-watch.us/reports.html https://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2025/03/trump-nih... https://apnews.com/article/trump-science-medicine-research-c... https://pepfar.impactcounter.com/ https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2025/06/04/health/trump-... https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2025/05/22/upshot/nsf-gr... https://airtable.com/appjhyo9NTvJLocRy/shrNto1NNp9eJlgpA?Ffj... https://www.nytimes.com/2025/02/14/health/national-institute... https://www.statnews.com/2025/05/08/trump-nih-cuts-jama-stud... https://www.nytimes.com/2025/02/27/health/usaid-contract-ter... https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2025/03/15/opinion/forei... https://www.nytimes.com/2025/03/07/health/usaid-funding-dise...
But most importantly there is no reason why that research has to be paid for by the government, out of taxpayer funds. The research will still be done, but more of the money will come from the corporations who benefit the most from it.
According to DiMasi et al¹ in 2013 a fully approved drug cost $2.870 billion USD, if you divide up the cost of all the failures to be paid for by the successes. They also say that this cost has been growing at 8.5% per year. If we take them at their word then that growth adds up to $7.639 billion USD per drug in 2013 dollars. There’s been 38% inflation since 2013, so that is actually $10.542 billion USD in 2025 dollars.
According to the FDA website² there have been an average of 48 approved drugs every year between 2021 and 2024. Drug development takes ages, probably over a decade, but I’m going to ignore that. 48 * $10.542 billion USD is $506 billion USD.
The NIH budget³ is $48 billion USD per year, of which they spend 92% on research. $44 billion USD is 8.0% of $550 billion USD. But actually that is apparently the 2023 budget amount, so maybe we should instead say that in 2023 it was 9.3% of the 2023 total. Either way it’s a small fraction of the research done in this country.
I know that there are other funding sources than just the NIH, but even so I really don’t think that the adjustment would need to be all that difficult.
¹ Joseph A. DiMasi, Henry G. Grabowski, Ronald W. Hansen, Innovation in the pharmaceutical industry: New estimates of R&D costs, Journal of Health Economics, Volume 47, 2016, Pages 20-33, ISSN 0167-6296, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jhealeco.2016.01.012. (https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S016762961...) Abstract: The research and development costs of 106 randomly selected new drugs were obtained from a survey of 10 pharmaceutical firms. These data were used to estimate the average pre-tax cost of new drug and biologics development. The costs of compounds abandoned during testing were linked to the costs of compounds that obtained marketing approval. The estimated average out-of-pocket cost per approved new compound is $1395 million (2013 dollars). Capitalizing out-of-pocket costs to the point of marketing approval at a real discount rate of 10.5% yields a total pre-approval cost estimate of $2558 million (2013 dollars). When compared to the results of the previous study in this series, total capitalized costs were shown to have increased at an annual rate of 8.5% above general price inflation. Adding an estimate of post-approval R&D costs increases the cost estimate to $2870 million (2013 dollars). Keywords: Innovation; R&D cost; Pharmaceutical industry; Discount rate; Technical success rates
² “Novel Drug Approvals at FDA” <https://www.fda.gov/drugs/development-approval-process-drugs...>
³ “Budget | National Institutes of Health (NIH)” <https://www.nih.gov/about-nih/organization/budget>
Yes, they do some early-stage R&D work, but it’s almost almost always downstream of publicly funded breakthroughs. They build on what’s already been de-risked. NIH isn’t just 8% of the money, it’s the first 8%, the part no one else wants to touch because it’s too uncertain, too slow, and too unprofitable in the intermediate term. Trials are expensive, that's where 80% of R&D today goes.
https://www.cbo.gov/publication/57126 https://www.pnas.org/doi/abs/10.1073/pnas.1715368115
Except that there are plenty of counterexamples to that idea. Bell Labs employed thousands of researchers and they made many foundational discoveries alongside the thousands of inventions that were merely development of the existing phone system. The list of foundational discoveries made there is so long that is hard to imagine. Just off the top of my head it includes the transistor, the integrated circuit, the operating system, lasers, fiber optics, CCDs, solar cells, etc, etc. Nyquist and Shannon worked there and discovered the mathematical foundations of information theory, including entropy, bits, communication channel capacity, etc, etc.
They were ridiculously productive and fantastically profitable, but these days with taxpayers funding research most corporations don’t bother any more.
The articles you link to have much to say about how research is currently done, but do not even purport to say that this is the only way it could ever be done.
Bell Labs was amazing, but it also was funded in large by profits from an emboldened AT&T with monopoly power. Is monopolistic profit funding more efficient than taxpayer funding? No idea.
This is the dumbest thing you’ve ever said, that’s for sure. I can have any opinions I want. I’m not limited to thinking thoughts you approve of, or that toe some imaginary line that you think exists.
If there was a decent chance that private investment by corporations in cancer research would turn a profit then they'd be doing it already, and paying researchers far more than universities can afford in order to recruit the best people.
The fact that isn't happening should tell you that profiting from fundamental cancer research is too high risk for the market to bare. Consequently government or charity are the only available options.
Sure, as you say a lot of therapies had their origin in taxpayer–funded research. But that doesn’t mean that there is a _need_ for the taxpayer to fund research. It’s a luxury at best and a subsidy for companies that already earn billions at worst. The corporations that earn those gigantic profits don’t need taxpayer money to do the job when they have the billions they earn from their customers every year.
No such realization happened. All that happened is that conservatives are lashing out against their perceived enemies and against those they see as easy target.
Also, the proposed budget bill represents will cause biggest deficit in a long time - and for years to come. If they were worried about affordability or deficit, that would not be happening.
Let's be clear. Cutting NSF, NIH, and higher education funding has nothing to do with bankruptcy and everything to do with the gutting and dumbing down of the US with some retribution sprinkled in. In fact, these types of cuts will likely lead to increase costs in the medium/long term as the population ages with worse preventative medicine.
If avoiding bankruptcy was really the goal as you say, Trump would not be proposing to increase defense spending by 13% and further cutting taxes. So just stop with this bankrupt the country angle because it's BS.
And lets also go ahead and use some real numbers. The increase in defense spending is ~113B to over 1T while the cuts to NIH/NSF have totaled ~23B. In 2024 the total NSF/NIH budget was ~60B.
Personally I have no problem with Trump withdrawing funding from institutions that clearly, by their own actions and words, support antisemitism. I’d prefer he went further though.
https://www.forbes.com/sites/johndrake/2025/05/19/trumps-nih...
The fact is that taxpayer–funded medical research is just a subsidy for the pharmaceutical industry. Pharmaceutical companies rake in billions in income from their successful products and don’t really need any subsidies.
And you’re right, the NIH is relatively small. A back of the envelope calculation suggests that ending the NIH entirely would raise the cost of developing medicines by less than 10%. There’s no way that’s a crisis. That’s just a slightly different way of doing business.