Yesterday President Obama was asked how he would respond to any effort to block the automatic spending cuts without corresponding abandonmment of the huge tax cuts Bush made for the very wealthy.
Obama’s sho9srt answer was
“NO.”
“I will veto any effort to get rid of those automatic spending cuts to domestic and defense spending. There will be no easy off ramps on this one,”
He went on to say who gets hurt by this … medical research.
Under the law, signed by Obama, there must be $1.2 trillion in across-the-board cuts. These are monloy about 3% but … because the discretionary busget is such a small part of the federal budget, NIH gets hit hugely. While half of these cuts to discretionary spending would come from defense spending, the rest would come from other federal departments and agencies, including the National Institutes of Health and the National Science Foundation. Norman Dicks (D – Wash.), says this means a 7.8 percent cut for agencies such as NIH, NSF, and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
It is likely that Dicks’ estimate is low. The pressure to preserve Defense funds is likely to be huge. Moreover, unlike the rest of the budget, the NIH model is based on a year to year funding model … in other words before funding new grants, the NIH needs tom pay for existing multi year grants.