7/31/2011

The National Institutes of Health Gives $90 million to China

All these things different spending items add up, but there is a broader issue of whether the government should even be involved in picking what research to subsidize. In addition, if research will pay off, why should the government be involved in the first place? This is from Fox News:

A conservative group is calling on Congress to temporarily suspend funding to the National Institutes of Health (NIH) after releasing a study that found the agency wasted half a billion dollars in taxpayer money on "bizarre projects," and gave more than $90 million to China, America’s largest creditor, over the last decade for other research. . . .
As part of its six-month investigation into NIH’s budget, the coalition discovered that the agency awarded more than $90 million to the Chinese government over the last decade, including $30 million in the last two and half years alone to scientists working at Chinese universities and institutions to research medical issues that affect Chinese citizens.
The coalition has also found that NIH has paid more than half a billion in funding grants to researchers to “conduct bizarre projects such as trying to find out if a mother rat will abandon her babies if given cocaine, and asking individuals to mail in their toenail clippings.”
"As our country heads to fiscal ruin, why are we giving millions in taxpayer dollars to Chinese science – which benefits China and its institutions – when they hold more than $1 trillion in American debt?" . . .

Labels:

0 Comments:

Post a Comment

<< Home