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The NIH budget wasn't cut. It has has a 15% growth or so for the last 5 years (this includes years with tax cuts), and this year it will have a 2.7% growth. The only real cuts are to new building funds, everything else still has growth. Every year the funding for grants has increased.
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I'm sort of new here, so please excuse me if you are an expert on this field and im wrong about what im going to say. It looks to me like you just googled NIH Budget then read the first 5 or so paragraphs of a year old doccument.
at some level you are correct though. The NIH will get more money this year than last. The large increases of the past were a comitment made to double the budget over 5 years. That ended in 2003. and you are correct that the planned increase for the year after that is 2.7%, which does beat inflation by a whopping .6% if im not mistaken. You could say that funding increases that go from 13%ish a year to 3% a year is a cutback as I did. You could also call me crap for saying that when a budget goes from $X to $X+$Y a "cutback." Thats fine. Also, it's fair to say that my war and tax cuts thing is incorrect, but money for those things does come from somewhere.
Those numbers aside I'll give you two things to support what I was saying from the start.
A) on a conference call yesterday i was told by a representative of the NIH that all studies were being evaluated for anything that could be cut to meet budget restrictions.
B) an article that says some of what im thinking -
http://www.newsmax.com/archives/arti...3/201534.shtml
Again, you don't have to buy it, and you can joke about who will think about the kids, but bush is throwing 27 billion it must be pretty important. I just think it's closer to 10% a year important than 3%.
All of this said, this isn't my largest issue with Bush. It's just one i hadn't seen brought up in this thread.