As the National Institutes of Health (NIH) gains even more funding from Congress, the agency is spending less time, money, and effort on researching the cures for various diseases, and instead promoting diversity initiatives to the tune of millions of taxpayer dollars.
Just The News reports that the NIH’s budget was increased dramatically in 2023 as a result of the $1.7 trillion omnibus package passed by Congress. The package increased NIH’s overall budget by $2.5 billion, marking a 5.6 percent increase from last year’s budget, and bringing the overall 2023 NIH budget to about $47.5 billion.
In recent years, the NIH has been spending millions to actively promote pseudo-science that allegedly confirms a connection between “racism” and various health issues in minority communities. The NIH in 2020 created an entirely new category of research called “social determinants of health,” which served as a funding vehicle for various grants to further produce such research.
One such example saw the NIH give a grant of $1.2 million in order to prove that “racism” was a cause of poor sleep in non-White communities. The subsequent “research” claimed that an alleged disparity in sleep between White people and black people can be “explained partially by experiences of interpersonal racial discrimination.”
“The central hypothesis is that police use of deadly force on unarmed black Americans leads to unhealthy sleep among other black Americans in the general U.S. population,” the grant summary concluded.
In addition to spending money on race-based research, the NIH has also provided funding for research into LGBT-based health issues. In 2012 and 2013, the NIH spent a total of $432,000 on a study of the gay dating app Grindr.
“The fact that NIH is doing this is very worrisome,” said Mike Gonzalez, a senior fellow at the Heritage Foundation with a focus on racial and cultural issues. “This is actually a danger now, the fact that it is entering medicine because these are life and death issues, and if we are going to be making these decisions based on these hocus pocus ideas of [Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion] in order to satisfy some virtue signaling that our government seems to be at this point completely suffused with, we are going to start putting people’s lives in danger.”