Powerful disease and research groups criticized President Obama’s budget Tuesday as inadequate to ensure the United States’s role as global research leader.
Federal funding for research suffered under sequestration, and the 2015 budget’s small increases for the National Institutes of Health and the Food and Drug Administration do not go far enough in reversing those cuts, the groups said.
{mosads}”We simply cannot sustain our nation’s research ecosystem, combat costly and deadly diseases like Alzheimer’s and cancer, and create quality jobs with anemic funding levels that threaten the health and prosperity of Americans,” said Research!America President Mary Woolley in a statement.
“These funding levels jeopardize our global leadership in science — in effect ceding leadership to other nations as they continue to invest in strong research and development infrastructures.”
United for Medical Research, another advocacy alliance, released a similar statement.
Under Tuesday’s proposal, the National Institutes of Health would receive $30.36 billion for fiscal year 2015, a slight increase over 2014. The agency received $30.86 billion in 2012, before sequestration cuts took effect.