!["Health and Human Services got the biggest piece. Health and Human Services — $15.8 billion in HHS. The biggest chunk of that is NIH. You all will remember that I came here last year and I tried to present to you a proposed $9 billion reduction in the NIH grants. I think it went from $35 [billion] down to $26 billion. We put it back in.
I learned a really valuable lesson last year. Not only did Congress not like our proposed NIH cuts last year, they made them illegal this year.
Remember last year, I came to you and I said, look, we want to reduce spending on NIH and the way we want to do it is by forcing the programs to look at their administrative costs. Because if they could get their administrative costs down to what they actually pay on administrative costs from private grants, we could cut $9 billion in spending and get the exact same amount of research. Do you remember that conversation, for those of you who were here? I certainly do.
Congress, when they passed the appropriations bill in April, said not only are we going to plus it back up to the $35-odd billion dollars or whatever it is, but they put a rider in that said it was against the law to spend any money to do analyses on the administrative costs. So they prevented us, by law, from trying to save money.
So I learned my lesson, and we said, “Okay, we got this extra money to spend.” We put another $9 billion in NIH, which makes up a big piece of the $15.8 [billion]. "](https://cdn.bsky.app/img/feed_thumbnail/plain/did:plc:5mt5ni4jxeid3iwob2lhi4ja/bafkreifvruvtxzhifm6h53wd42aqfnvshtcbrj4xdpa6vwo6ltvobgzkkq)
"Health and Human Services got the biggest piece. Health and Human Services — $15.8 billion in HHS. The biggest chunk of that is NIH. You all will remember that I came here last year and I tried to present to you a proposed $9 billion reduction in the NIH grants. I think it went from $35 [billion] down to $26 billion. We put it back in. I learned a really valuable lesson last year. Not only did Congress not like our proposed NIH cuts last year, they made them illegal this year. Remember last year, I came to you and I said, look, we want to reduce spending on NIH and the way we want to do it is by forcing the programs to look at their administrative costs. Because if they could get their administrative costs down to what they actually pay on administrative costs from private grants, we could cut $9 billion in spending and get the exact same amount of research. Do you remember that conversation, for those of you who were here? I certainly do. Congress, when they passed the appropriations bill in April, said not only are we going to plus it back up to the $35-odd billion dollars or whatever it is, but they put a rider in that said it was against the law to spend any money to do analyses on the administrative costs. So they prevented us, by law, from trying to save money. So I learned my lesson, and we said, “Okay, we got this extra money to spend.” We put another $9 billion in NIH, which makes up a big piece of the $15.8 [billion]. "
The Trump White House tried to slash indirect costs in 2017 and got very rebuffed by Congress. Here is Budget Director Mick Mulvaney commenting to the press in 2018 about getting his fingers burned on that. trumpwhitehouse.archives.gov/briefings-st...
