Posted on behalf of Meredith Wadman.
There’s nothing like a roundtable in Washington three weeks before Election Day to get a reporter confused about just where the candidates stand on matters like the future of National Institutes of Health (NIH) funding. Or stem cell research.
With a sparkling US Capitol in the background, policy emissaries from the McCain and Obama campaigns today (14 October) spent an hour jousting about health care reform and scientific research in the swishy, glass-walled digs of the Knight Conference Center on the seventh floor at 555 Pennsylvania Avenue.
The event was put together by science advocacy group Research!America. Representing the red corner was Ike Brannon, a senior policy adviser for McCain with a background at the Treasury Department and the Office of Management and Budget (Douglas Holtz-Eakin of McCain’s innermost circle apparently gave organizers the slip to hit the campaign trail with his boss). Tim Westmoreland, a professor of law and public policy who used to direct the federal Medicaid programme, was dispatched from Georgetown University to hold up the side for Obama. The moderator was David Leonhardt, the New York Times economics columnist.
After pushing Westmoreland and Brannon for a guided tour of the McCain and Obama health plans, Leonhardt, who did his level best to get them to actually answer questions, came around to NIH funding.
He asked what the NIH budget would be on the last day of a two-term McCain or Obama administration. Westmoreland assured the audience of Obama’s commitment to double basic research spending during his first term, but made no mention of what the NIH picture would look like eight years out. Nor did he mention Obama’s avowed commitment to double NIH’s whole budget – not just its basic research – over ten years. He did harp, though, on the opportunity costs to biomedical research of the current flat-funding situation.
Brannon said that, after eight years of McCain, NIH funding “definitely would be up” — invoking McCain’s support for the 2007 America Competes Act. (Small detail: the Act doesn’t deal with NIH, but with doubling research budgets in the physical sciences, see here.)
I asked Brannon to clarify how America Competes pertains to the NIH budget. Brannon’s response: “[McCain’s] commitment—to the extent we’ve had a conversation on this—he has always made clear that the America Competes Act, which is on a pace to double in the next seven years, would definitely go up.”
Still no mention of the National Institutes of Health.
On stem cells, Brannon was more assured. In response to a question from Leonhardt about the politicization of science under George Bush, he said: “We have differed with the [Bush] administration on a number of things, most significantly on stem cell research. Senator McCain is a big proponent of stem cell research and he feels that there has been a great opportunity lost in the way in which — in the ability of the federal government to assist our researchers.”
When I pressed him further for specifics after the session he directed me to Jay Khosla. I dutifully jotted Jay’s email address and emailed him about stem cells and NIH.
Aware of the journalistic need to be an equal opportunity pest, I asked Westmoreland how, in the current climate, Obama proposed to pay for doubling NIH funding over ten years. “Let me be clear. What I said was doubling basic research,” he said, adding that, he had to check his facts and get back to me. (As noted above, Obama says in black and white that he would double the entire NIH budget over a decade. He says the same about the National Science Foundation, the National Institute of Standards and Technology, and the Department of Energy’s Office of Science. )
Whatever. “Where would the new NIH money come from?” I persisted. Westmoreland wavered, saying he needed to check his facts. “I know this is not typical for quoting political types, but I’m not really that kind of political type, the Inside-the-Beltway kind of political type, what I’d like to do is double check….” That said, he ventured that Obama would fund the doubling by letting Bush’s tax cuts on the wealthy expire, thus generating $60 to $70 billion in new revenue per year. “I think we’ve got plenty of cash.”
Several hours later, Holtz-Eakin got back to me on the questions I’d sent to Khosla.
He provided this in an email:
“Ensuring that our doctors and scientists have appropriate funding to continue their research efforts is an important priority. John McCain has voted to double the funding for National Institutes of Health (NIH), and as President he will support strong funding for NIH to ensure that our researchers have necessary funding to defeat devastating diseases like cancer once and for all.”
As well as this:
“John McCain has a clear voting record on supporting federal funding for stem cell research. As president, he will strongly support funding for promising research programs, including amniotic fluid and adult stem cell research….. Where federal funds are used for stem cell research, Senator McCain believes clear lines should be drawn that reflect a refusal to sacrifice moral values and ethical principles for the sake of scientific progress, and that any such research should be subject to strict federal guidelines.”
The studious among you will notice a familiar echo to responses we published last month in our election special. Ever hopeful for a little straight talk from a straight question, I emailed Holtz-Eakin back, asking him to specify what NIH funding would look like at the end of a second McCain term in the White House, and whether McCain would use an executive order to lift President Bush’s current stem cell policy. Watch this space.
Meredith Wadman