Lawmakers Who Cut Funds For ALS Research Take Ice Bucket Challenge

They may not even realize the contradiction.

These contradictory decisions don’t necessarily make the lawmakers hypocrites. Many of them reluctantly cast that vote, and others are fine with funding ALS research so long as the funding comes from private sources and not federal taxes. But the contradiction does expose the curious ways in which government officials often end up dealing with problems they created.

The funding cuts, in this case, were caused by the passage of the Budget Control Act of 2011 — otherwise known as the bill to save the United States government from default. As a condition of getting congressional Republicans to sign off on the debt ceiling hike, the Obama White House and Congressional Democrats agreed to budget cuts and future budget cuts that would be delivered via sequestration, an across-the-board cleaver that cut certain agencies’ budgets by roughly 5 percent.

The National Institutes of Health was one of those agencies. It was forced to slash an estimated $1.55 billion from its programs. Among those was the National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke. In Fiscal Year 2013, the NINDS budget was $1.53 billion, a $92 million decrease from FY 2012. For ALS-specific research, funding went from $44 million to $39 million.

By: William

retired military , former cop, lifelong gym rat and doting grandfather alive and living in Maine