Former House Speaker Newt Gingrich is joining the small crowd of Republicans calling for a reversal of budget cuts at the National Institutes of Health.
In a New York Times op-ed published Wednesday, the Republican wrote that it is “irresponsible and shortsighted, not prudent, to let financing for basic research dwindle.”
Gingrich argues that Congress should double the funding for the National Institutes of Health, which conducts and funds basic medical research.
Medical research spending has been constrained by the broad caps on spending implemented in the wake of debt ceiling negotiations between congressional Republicans and President Obama.
At about $30 billion last year, National Institutes of Health funding has been roughly flat since 2003, Gingrich noted.
Other prominent Republicans, including current members of Congress, have proposed boosted spending for the institutes, but doing so would be difficult while maintaining the spending caps, which many fiscal conservatives see as a priority.
Earlier in April, former Republican Majority Leader Eric Cantor suggested that Republicans could cut a deal with Obama to raise the defense spending cap and the non-defense spending cap in tandem, as Obama has demanded, by putting all of the incremental non-defense spending into medical and scientific research.
Gingrich expressed support for a move by Reps. Diana DeGette, D-Colo., and Michael Burgess, R-Tx., to require the Congressional Budget Office to consider the advantageous long-term benefits of medical research spending when estimating the cost of funding the Institutes.
The government is spending $1.3 billion a year on Alzheimer’s and dementia research, Gingrich notes, only a tiny amount of the $154 billion it will spend treating those conditions through government healthcare programs this year.
