On April 30, the Senate Appropriations Committee will hold a session on Biomedical Research: Keeping America’s Edge. With the recent devastating cuts to the Department of Health and Human Services, the committee has a herculean task. Too much damage has been done to reclaim our leadership in biomedical innovation, but perhaps they can stanch the hemorrhage of talented staff and promising research that has been halted.

I’m an infectious diseases physician and was involved in clinical trials testing new antibiotics and treatments for sepsis.

Are you waiting for a new drug for your drug-resistant infection or cancer? Forget it. Clinical trials were stopped abruptly, abandoning patients.

Funding from the National Institutes of Health, totaling $187 billion, contributed to 354 of 356 drugs (99.4%) approved from 2010 to 2019. A recent report found that the return was $2.56 for each dollar invested.

On March 27, the Department of Health and Human Services announced drastic cuts that would gut 20,000 jobs. Maryland, particularly the Washington-Baltimore area, will be disproportionately affected, as 40% of the agency’s staff live there.

The cuts hit the hardest for the Food and Drug Administration (3500), NIH (1200), Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services, and Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration. Besides the direct cuts, many contractors will lose their positions. Maryland will lose another 50,000 jobs through cuts to related life-science nonprofits.

Budget cuts will decimate research at Johns Hopkins Medicine — it had $857 million in grant funding in fiscal 2024 alone. The University of Maryland anticipated a loss of $5.8 million just this year. These cuts are on top of the indirect funding already eliminated this year, totaling almost $50 million to the universities. The ripple effect expands from the NIH.

Leaders at th NIH were fired. There’s no one left to sign off on grants for the coming fiscal year. These were funds already approved by Congress — so the will of the people is being ignored by axing congressionally legislated funds.

The economic impact on our state alone is $5.3 billion.

There is no good reason for what this administration is doing to our research infrastructure. We need to keep investing in our future and make science politics-free. Please tell your representatives. 5Calls.org makes it easy to do.

Judy Stone, M.D., Cumberland