President Trump’s budget is to be released tomorrow at 11 a.m., but some minion at the Department of Health & Human Services posted the department’s “budget in brief” document this afternoon. It was quickly taken down, but not before the Washington Examiner snagged a copy.
The document shows the anti-alcohol Centers for Disease Control & Prevention’s budget being sliced by $1.322 billion. That pales, however, in comparison to the $5.78 billion slashing in the National Institutes of Health budget authority.
Substance Abuse & Mental Health Services Administration’s budget is trimmed to $3.771 billion from $4.156 billion.
Some $222 million of the CDC’s budget reduction is accounted for by cuts to the National Center for Chronic Disease Prevention & Health Promotion unit, which is where CDC’s alcohol programs are located.
Believe it or not (and we don’t) CDC in the budget document claims “chronic diseases are responsible for seven of 10 deaths each year, and treating people with chronic diseases accounts for 86% of our nation’s health care costs.” “Most chronic diseases are caused by a few risk behaviors: tobacco use, poor nutrition, lack of physical activity and excessive alcohol consumption.”
The budget creates a new America’s Health block grant “to provide flexibility for each state to implement specific interventions to address its population’s unique public health issues” including “tobacco prevention and control, diabetes, heart disease and stroke, nutrition, physical activity and obesity and arthritis.”
National Institute on Alcohol Abuse & Alcoholism sees its budget slashed 29%, to $361 million from $467 million, and the National Institute on Drug Abuse budget is cut nearly 25%. You can expect to hear academic medical centers scream over these cuts, since nearly 80% of the NIH budget “supports the extramural research community through nearly 300,000 researchers at more than 2,500 universities, medical schools and other research institutions in every state and around the world,” the budget briefing says.
The SAMHSA budget for substance abuse prevention is trimmed 32% to $150 million, while the budget for substance abuse treatment is unchanged.
Comment: We’re really skeptical about the “Chronic Disease Prevention & Health Promotion” unit because it is largely soft science. Remember the 1980s when the Feds told you to consume vast amounts of carbs? That was the start of the obesity epidemic. As for “excessive alcohol consumption” causing some diseases, that’s true. What the budget doesn’t promote is the idea of moderate alcohol consumption reducing cardiovascular disease.