Where’s Tom Coburn when you need him? The retired senator is back in Oklahoma, of course, but his valiant efforts to expose government waste will be sorely missed. Especially now that President Obama wants to go on a government-spending spree.
Take the president’s proposal to increase federal funding for the National Institutes of Health by $1 billion, to $31.3 billion. On the heels of the Ebola crisis, pumping more money into medical research might seem reasonable, even praiseworthy.
Except Sen. Coburn regularly reminded us how the government squanders tax dollars with his annual Wastebook highlighting wasteful government spending.
Politico reported last October that the 2014 edition of the Wastebook “skewers” the NIH. For example, Politico cites:
- $387,000 for a study on rodent rubdowns;
- $371,000 spent on researching women’s emotional state when they see their dog compared to seeing their child;
- $533,000 for studying how Buddhism explains the science of meditation; and
- $804,000 spent developing “Kiddio: Food Fight,” a smartphone game aimed at empowering parents in vegetable-eating negotiations with their children.
(Note: Since Coburn’s Senate website is shut down, all the links to the study no longer work.)
Amazingly, Politico quotes NIH Director Francis Collins as saying, “If we had not gone through our 10-year slide in research support, we probably would have had [an Ebola] vaccine in time for this [crisis].”
Or … maybe if the agency hadn’t spent so much money on rodent rubdowns and food fights it could have had an Ebola vaccine.
This isn’t to say that the NIH and its many sub-agencies don’t do good and beneficial research, but taxpayers pay for a whole lot of projects that most people would consider a complete waste of money.
But the president’s proposed increase highlights an undisclosed motive: Leftists believe that government does anything better than the private sector, and that goes double for medical research.
For a decade or more, leftists have been trying to replace private sector medical research with government-funded research. They believe that private sector companies cannot be trusted to fund the right—read: politically correct—projects, and when companies do create a new drug or medical device, they charge too much.
So the left’s solution has been to redirect research to the government, which they think will come up with more cures in less time and for less money. Obama’s proposed NIH funding increase should be seen in that liberal light.