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President Donald Trump’s federal budget proposal would precipitously cut our country’s annual investment in research. It would slash $5.8 billion (nearly 20 percent) of funding from the National Institutes of Health (NIH) and cut the National Science Foundation budget by nearly 10 percent.

The budget also includes deep cuts to the Food and Drug Administration, and absorption of the Agency for Health Research and Quality (AHRQ) into NIH with elimination of the funding for AHRQ. The annual total of the unprecedented cuts to research would tally about $7 billion nationally, and would virtually ensure the NIH would be unable to award any new grants next year.

These cuts would have catastrophic effects on people in Wisconsin and elsewhere waiting for new discoveries that lead to treatments and cures. The proposed cuts would undermine our efforts to address health care disparities and to find cost-effective ways to treat cancer, cardiovascular disease and chronic diseases such as diabetes, obesity and asthma.