Washington Post | By: Dave McCormick
Two years ago, KJ Muldoon was born with a rare, often fatal genetic disorder. Today he is walking and talking. How? Researchers at Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia (CHOP) and the University of Pennsylvania, funded by the National Institutes of Health, saved his life with the world’s first personalized gene-editing therapy.
CHOP is now seeking the next miracle cure at its new Morgan Center for Research and Innovation, which I visited last week. These breakthroughs are possible because NIH funds foundational science that saves lives and lowers the cost of disease.
Federal research and private enterprise made American medicine the envy of the world, and artificial intelligence is accelerating discovery like never before. Yet at the most exciting moment in medical history, I fear the United States will surrender its lead to China through underinvestment and mismanagement.
This summer, the White House rightly called for a new golden age of American science. Reaching it requires long overdue reform and more investment in federal research and development.
Conservatives should recognize that basic research, like national security, is a public good that private capital rarely funds. Businesses excel at turning discoveries into products and jobs, but foundational science pays off too slowly and uncertainly. Government fills the gap, funding the long-term, high-risk work that businesses turn into breakthroughs with stunning payoffs for society.
The federal government spends $7 trillion a year, yet less than 1 percent goes to NIH research. That sliver delivers outsize returns.
NIH’s Diabetes Prevention Program, for example, cut Type 2 diabetes risk by 58 percent over a three-year period. NIH-supported eye-disease research saved $28.5 billion in health care costs over 10 years. Drug therapies also reduced legal blindness by 50 percent among people with wet macular degeneration, an eye disease caused by leaking blood vessels. And CAR-T cell therapy, pioneered at Penn with NIH support, reengineers patients’ T cells to attack cancer, producing decade-long remissions and replacing years of costly treatments.
The list goes on.
Nationally, every NIH dollar also generates roughly $2.50 in economic activity. In Pennsylvania, NIH research sustains over 21,000 jobs and generates an impact of more than $5 billion annually, and AI will accelerate breakthroughs. Earlier this year, for example, NIH Director Jay Bhattacharya and I saw how researchers in Pittsburgh and Philadelphia are using it to detect cancer earlier, speed drug discovery and make surgery more precise.
Yet America’s global leadership is slipping.
China is closing the gap, having increased research and development spending from 36 percent of the U.S. level in 2008 to parity in 2024. Beijing now accounts for about one-third of the world’s clinical-stage drugs.
Meanwhile, the U.S. is underinvesting in discovery. Federal R&D fell from 1.86 percent of gross domestic product in 1964 to 0.63 percent in 2024. Since 2003, the NIH budget has shrunk by more than 10 percent, adjusted for inflation.
We have also let politics intrude on science. The NIH under the Biden administration gave CHOP $155,000 to develop training on “structural racism” and “intersectional microaggressions.” Such initiatives abused taxpayer money and undermined trust.
Finally, NIH has become opaque and bureaucratic. Nearly 1 in 3 grant dollars goes to overhead, and taxpayers can’t easily see financial ties of researchers to industry. Each of these failures has a fix.
First, rather than cut NIH by nearly 40 percent, as the Office of Management and Budget proposed last year, we should double its $48 billion budget within five years. These are big numbers, but if they yield discoveries that trim the nation’s $5.3 trillion health bill by just 1 percent, they will more than pay for themselves.
Second, prioritize merit-based science. The Trump administration rightly reassessed grants lacking merit, and it canceled nearly 1,400 midstream, many over diversity, equity and inclusion language. While some of these grants deserved to be canceled, some were legitimate research with buzzwords inserted to get approval from the Biden administration.
For half those grants alone, taxpayers had already paid nearly $1.3 billion for work that might never be finished.
Rather than waste that investment, we should let researchers revise their applications and keep working. That is why I led five Senate Republican colleagues in urging the administration to do exactly that.
Third, demand accountability. The NIH’s costly, noncompetitive overhead system should be replaced with one that rewards efficiency, makes institutions compete for infrastructure dollars and gives smaller research centers a fair shot. I will soon introduce the Sunshine for Researchers Act to require federally funded researchers to disclose significant financial connections to the business sector. And my bipartisan NIH Mentorship Modernization Act, introduced with Sen. Chris Coons (D-Delaware), would help retain young scientists, which is a priority for NIH.
At this pivotal moment, incrementalism is the nation’s greatest enemy. America was built by pilgrims and pioneers who dared to push beyond the known. We must summon that spirit again by investing boldly, prioritizing science and reforming relentlessly.
If we dare, KJ’s story can be the beginning of a new golden age of American science.