Don Nickles: “Basically, the headline is ``NIH Scientist Says He's Paid To Do Nothing; Agency Denies Administrator's `Surreal…”

“Basically, the headline is ``NIH Scientist Says He's Paid To Do Nothing; Agency Denies Administrator's `Surreal Situation' Of Collecting $100,000 Salary For No Work.'' The story goes on. I remember reading it, and I thought, whoa, somebody is not paying attention. Please don't get me wrong. I know NIH does a lot of great work and I am supportive of that. But right now we have to live within a budget. If the committee wanted to--the committee has $127 billion in discretionary spending--they could have given NIH more money. They had control over that $127 billion. They could have shifted it around to where NIH would get more. What the committee elected to do was: We will short fund NIH and we will give a lot more money for a lot of other things, and then we will try to run the gamut because we know NIH has a lot of support. I think the committee needs to go back and say: Wait a minute, the budget is $127 billion. It happens to be the largest budget of any that we have before any committee, with the exception of Defense.”