Trump Budget Is Bad News For Houston Medical Institutions

Houston could be summed up as a city of oil and medical care that tolerates a sprinkling of other industries, and low oil prices have not been good to the area for the past several years. Now, the Trump administration's budget proposal threatens to do more harm to the local economy.

The proposal, released this week, seeks to cut $5.8 billion from the National Institutes of Health, and if those cuts are enacted, medical institutions in the city would not be spared the pain.

"If this proposal were to move forward, it would cause long-term damage to the pre-eminence of biological science across the globe. It would lead to negative consequences for many years," Dr. Paul Klotman, president and CEO of the Baylor College of Medicine, said in a statement.

Baylor College of Medicine received $252 million in funding in 2016, while the University of Texas M.D. Anderson Cancer Center and the University of Texas Health Science Center received $124.5 million and $87.8 million, respectively. The three are the largest Houston-area recipients of NIH funding.

Other local institutions receiving grants include Rice University ($14,666,448); Methodist Hospital Research Institute ($14,194,521); and Chrysalis Biotherapeutics ($1,000,000).

The Houston Business Journal reports that the Houston area was the recipient of more than 1,300 grants and $610.1 million in NIH funding in 2016, according to the agency's data. Overall, Houston took in more grant money than 39 states and the District of Columbia. The NIH awarded $24 billion in grants in 2016, which went toward cancer research and a multitude of other medical endeavors.

The state of Texas is ranked fifth among states for number of NIH grants received on 2016 — 2,633 — nearly half of which went to Houston-area institutions and firms. Only Pennsylvania, New York, Massachusetts and California received more NIH grants than Texas in 2016.

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— Image courtesy Wikipedia/Michael Vadon