Let me say this clearly, so as to be understood: We live in such a fucked up political landscape that Newt Gingrich is the voice of reason...NEWT GINGRICH IS THE VOICE OF REASON. Let that sink in a minute.
Newt is a well documented fan of science. A nerd if you will. Also, there seems to be a bit of legacy shaping happening in this piece. But yeah, this is a guy that wants to build moon bases, his desire to increase funding for NASA and the NIH are well documented. No surprise here. In many ways, he's a pretty kick ass guy, it's just unfortunate he chose the wrong party.NO one who lived through the 1990s would have suspected that one day people would look back on the period as a golden age of bipartisan cooperation.
It's almost like some great leader made a contract with America which led to this nirvana.
If we are going at it on the health monies ... go ahead and triple the VA's budget. Because having an ailing, emotionally rearranged population constantly called heroes while being disparaged by the system is not all that far from how Plutarch ended up writing about "a Thracian of Nomadic stock".
Yet the N.I.H. is spending just $1.3 billion a year on Alzheimer’s and dementia research — or roughly 0.8 percent of the $154 billion these conditions will cost Medicare and Medicaid this year, more than all federal education spending. It surprises me that this is the primary example. I'd heard before that Alzheimer's was a field currently going through a lot of growth / heavy amount of research. Maybe not the scale of cancer, but still a top topic in neuroscience. Is that not true? Or is a lot of funding for it coming from outside the NIH?For example, the total cost of care for Alzheimer’s and other dementia is expected to exceed $20 trillion over the next four decades — including a 420 percent increase in costs to Medicare and a 330 percent increase in costs to Medicaid. Even without a cure, the premium on breakthrough research is high: Delaying the average onset of the disease by just five years would reduce the number of Americans with Alzheimer’s in 2050 by 42 percent, and cut costs by a third. And that’s not even counting the human toll on both patients and caregivers (often family members), whose own health may deteriorate because of stress and depression.
The annual budget of NINDS is around $1.3bln and NIA $1.1bln, so a total investment of $1.3 for AD is actually pretty damn high, relatively speaking. I'm not sure what other institutes support AD research, but I imagine those are the two primary ones. A doubling of the total NIH budget would be a very good thing, but it should come with structural reforms, as well. Primarily, the indirect cost model, which basically uses NIH money to fund universities, needs to go ASAP. Our institution (not a university, actually) has an indirect rate of I believe 48.5%. For the uninitiated, that means that one third of all dollars that I get from the feds to support my research goes to the administration of the institution. One hopes that those monies support paying the mortgage, paying the administrators, and paying the utilities, but generally, that money can go into the general fund. So, at a university it's probably paying some instructors' salaries and for building remodels. That's why if you don't get a grant, you're out on your ass. The bureaucracy is gigantic, and getting bigger all the time. The system feels soviet in its proportions and complexity at times. Also, the previous time that the NIH budget was doubled, lots of the money was used to fund more and more graduate students, many of whom are fucked right now because of the lack of available jobs. For these reasons, I'm all for increasing the budget, but also for reforming the NIH, turning it into a research supporting organization, instead of club where old faculty and administrators give each other reach arounds to the tune of billions of dollars.
Weird, I seem to recall people at LBNL mentioning they couldn't get some grant because it required tracking of every dollar and thus forbade slush funds. I'd thought at the time they'd said it was a NIH thing, but searching elsewhere definitely confirms what you were saying. This link lists overhead costs of up to 62% though. Holy fuck.