Opinion | The Pharmaceutical Industry Heads Into Elon Musks Wood Chipper

In a month of one bombshell after another (and many all at the same time), it can be hard to track the damage that the Trump administration is inflicting.But unlike attacks on predictable issues like D.E.I.

and foreign aid, the announcement on Friday that the National Institutes of Health would slash funding for medical research doesn’t make even cynical political sense.It’s a decision that would endanger Americans’ health, go against decades of bipartisan support and could torch one of the nation’s most astounding, productive and envied industries.

On Monday, a Federal District Court judge temporarily blocked the cuts, but the administration seems unlikely to just drop the matter.The N.I.H.’s announcement was made, of course, in the language of “efficiency.” “Can you believe that universities with tens of billions in endowments were siphoning off 60 percent of research award money for ‘overhead’?” Elon Musk wrote.“What a rip-off!” The actual percentage is less than half that, but sure, put it all in the wood chipper.The problem with doing that is that these grants are a crucial reason that America has the most advanced biomedical research infrastructure — the N.I.H.

awards grants to more than 300,000 researchers at more than 2,500 institutions, including the Mayo Clinic and the MD Anderson Cancer Center in Texas — along with some of the biggest pharmaceutical companies in the world.Every dollar in N.I.H.

grants spurs $2.09 in economic activity, and every $100 million in investment leads to 78 patents and $598 million in further research, according to N.I.H.calculations.

Those “overheads” help cover basic infrastructure that make all this possibleThe grants have been the source of new treatments for cancer, heart disease, diabetes, strokes and H.I.V.; wonder drugs like Ozempic; groundbreaking techniques like I.V.F.and laparoscopies.

Cutting them will significantly narrow the pipeline to future cures and drugs.Some of the bigge...