Want to see Washington bureaucrats move with the speed of light? Just utter these two words: “Budget cut.” Before you can blink twice, they will have shut down the Washington Monument and issued a flood of press releases predicting the imminent starvation of babies and the demise of democracy and the American Way. Soon enough, the politician who used those two words is deluged with constituents demanding to know why he wants to starve babies and destroy democracy and the American Way. Politician panics, the bureaucrats get a budget increase and everything returns to normal here in the nation’s capital. Once again, the Washington Monument Strategy — shut down the most popular services first — has worked its magic.
National Institutes of Health officials have recently gone into full Washington Monument strategy mode, making the rounds of the mainstream media predicting the end of chronic disease research, clinical trials on new wonder treatments for things like heart disease and studies on ways of regenerating tissue in the human body. All of these terrible things and much more will come about if Congress accepts President Bush’s proposed cut of NIH’s current $28 billion annual budget by $328 million. To put that proposed cut in perspective, a $328 million reduction of a $28 billion budget equals a cut of 1.18 percent. That’s right, one point one eight percent.
What makes NIH protests of the proposed budget cut especially galling is not simply the arrogance of bureaucrats advancing their own selfish political interests by using the suffering of people with chronic diseases. What is really grating is the insolent profligacy of these bureaucrats. To see the utter preposterousness of their claim to be unable to find anywhere in the NIH budget except core functions, all that is necessary is to take a look at recent headlines.
Like the one about NIH paying a highly educated staff microbiologist $100,000 a year for more than seven years to do nothing. The man got on the wrong side of the NIH powers-that-be, so they took away all of his duties but kept giving him a paycheck. Or the one about the $3.2 million, five-year study of prostitutes and masseuses. Then there was the $4.6 million, six-year Native American Indian Transgender study. And who can forget the $107,000 examination of mediums and spirit possession religions?
The truth is that, like all government bureaucracies, NIH could easily absorb a 1.18 percent reduction in its budget and never look back, especially considering that the institute’s budget has almost doubled under Bush.
