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That’s not the case here at all. NIH, NSF and the like have enormous amounts of discretion where they allocate funds, even if it appears to be earmarked.
For example, huge chunk of NIH funds are earmarked for cancer research. The result of this is grant applications for this money have to include some section about how their research is related to study of cancer, and this is enough for it to qualify. I learned this from some of my friends doing biotech research. Literally all of them work under cancer research grant, but their actual research has very little to do with cancer per se.
How to study AIDS on cancer grant? Easy: AIDS causes cancer, so AIDS prevention reduces cancer incidence. Done. No need to reallocate anything in Congress.
So, I'm not talking about earmark at all. Try to be less stupid.
Here's a CRS report on NIH funding for instance
To the basically literate eye, one would find a table with the following budget authorities:
Institutes/Centers
Cancer Institute (NCI) Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute (NHLBI) Dental/Craniofacial Research (NIDCR) Diabetes/Digestive/Kidney (NIDDK) Neurological Disorders/Stroke (NINDS) Allergy/Infectious Diseases (NIAID) General Medical Sciences (NIGMS) Child Health/Human Development (NICHD) National Eye Institute (NEI) Environmental Health Sciences (NIEHS)
Those aren't the only ones. There are more, but it's easy enough to understand the breakdown.
Moving money from NCI to NIGMS, for instance, would require congressional approval. How money within NIGMS is spent is more discretionary, sure. But your contention is either a deliberate misunderstanding of my original outline of the problem, or a weird semantic gotcha. Either way, it betrays a profound level of ignorance (intentional or otherwise) of how Congressional appropriations work. But I repeat myself. Your use of the term "earmark" in a wildly inappropriate manner betrays you.
Fraud is generally not covered by Congressional appropriations.
You don’t need to move any funds. You can study AIDS on cancer institute funds. You can study it on kidney institute funds. You can do it on infections diseases institute funds. As I said, the way the system works is that NIH has enormous amount of discretion here. The only way to prevent it would be to literally have executive tell the underlings explicitly to stop funding AIDS, or have Congress pass explicit law prohibiting them from doing so.
I’m literally telling you how the actual system works in practice. You can keep talking about appropriations and chide me for using the word “earmark” in a technically incorrect sense, but it is you who has no idea about how biotech funding actually works. Doing biomedical research that only tangentially concerns cancer under cancer grant is not fraud, it’s a day that ends in y. Talk to literally anyone in biomedical research.
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You know better than this. I've talked to you before about how you have a habit of earning AAQCs followed by posting something clearly and intentionally antagonistic. This gets you another three-day ban. You can correct people without the juvenile namecalling.
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Looks like in 1981 NIH had $3.5 billion in total, $1 billion for National Cancer Institute and $228 million for NIAID, $527 million for Heart Lung Blood Institute, $331 million for general health. Is the budget further itemized within those agencies? Seems like they could have used any of these budgets. Saying they were doing a cancer investigation wouldn't have even been a stretch as incidences of kaposi sarcoma was one of the primary early symptoms that got the whole investigation started.
A typical use of cancer funds is a grant where you GMO some bacteria to produce some protein, which you then concentrate, crystallize, then do some X-ray crystallography to analyze its structure. What does it have to do with cancer? Oh right, that protein may lead to a cancer drug, maybe. But, you know, it might also lead to AIDS drug! Who knows.
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