Yesterday I made the point that while research universities and academic medical centers may be coded-blue in many ways, they’re far from limited to Blue states. Indeed, overall they tend to be more crucial to regional economies in red states and districts than in blue ones. And sure enough, Alabama’s junior senator Katie Britt, who inherited the seat from one-time boss Dick Shelby, has chimed in to support my argument. She ran to the local paper to promise to she’s going to work super hard with RFK Jr to make sure her state doesn’t lose all its funding. “While the administration works to achieve this goal at NIH, a smart, targeted approach is needed in order to not hinder life-saving, groundbreaking research at high-achieving institutions like those in Alabama,” she told AL.com
A few facts. The University of Alabama at Birmingham is the largest employer in the state. It gets more than a billion dollars a year from NIH funding. The head of the Birmingham Business Alliance is quoted saying the whole thing is super bad. Birmingham’s Mayor Russell Woodfin also seems to be freaking out. Britt wouldn’t stop talking: “While the administration works to achieve this goal at NIH, a smart, targeted approach is needed in order to not hinder life-saving, groundbreaking research at high-achieving institutions like those in Alabama.”
The University of Alabama at Huntsville is comparably reliant on NIH funding grants. And we’re certainly to see similar outcries from Republican representatives in other states as they find out often from Republican stakeholders in their states about what the NIH cuts mean for them. Then the question is likely to move on to whether Trump can shift the question from one of across the board cuts to cuts that only target institutions in Blue states or simply any institutions that don’t support Donald Trump.
There’s a lot left to how this part of the story will play out.
