Chemistry&Industry • June 2013 50

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funding for physician-administered drugs is being cut to healthcare centres and forcing them to divert care to other centres and hospitals,’ she said. ‘This is causing a delay in treatment and increasing costs to both Medicare and the patients it covers.’

Universities have hit out, too – claiming the sequester will damage innovation. ‘To put it kindly, this is an irrational approach to deficit reduction; to put it not so kindly, it is just plain stupid,’ American Association of Universities president Hunter Rawlings told a senate committee.

Other cuts have yet to have an impact. For example, while the National Science Foundation’s budget has been reduced, in reality its grant funding cycle starts in the summer, so cuts won’t become obvious until the 2013-14 academic year, with current grants being unaffected. The agency expects to make about 1000 fewer grants than its more typical 11000.

The National Institutes of Health, meanwhile, was hit by a $1.6bn funding reduction, which pressure group United for Medical Research claims will lead to more than 20,000 job losses and a $3bn reduction in economic output. ‘We cannot allow budget cuts, such as those looming from the sequester, to undermine the biomedical research enterprise, causing the loss of jobs and prosperity, as well as setting us back at a time when we are on the cusp of exciting new advances in cancer, heart disease, diabetes and Alzheimer’s, and many other diseases,’ claimed UMR president Carrie Wolinetz.

As the arguments for exemptions from the sequester continue, the wrangling over the 2014 budget has already started. The President’s proposals restate his ‘compromise’ offer made in December 2012, with $2 of spending cuts for every $1 saved by closing tax loopholes and reducing tax breaks for the wealthiest. Further savings will be made via $400bn of health savings by cracking down on waste and fraud in Medicare. Investments will be made in education, manufacturing, infrastructure and small businesses.

The Republican proposals, meanwhile, introduce another new tax cut for the wealthiest, while raising the tax burden on the middle classes. As well as deep cuts in research and education investments, it also proposes to turn Medicare into a voucher system, leading to much higher out-of-pocket payments that many retired people can ill afford.

Don’t expect the 2014 budget to be passed any time soon.

Sarah Houlton is a chemicals writer based in Boston, US

Budget cuts begin to biteSpending cuts are already starting to have an impact on healthcare provision and aviation

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Sarah Houlton

It didn’t come as much of a surprise when US Democrats and Republicans failed to agree on financial cuts that would allow the budget sequester,

required by the 2011 Budget Control Act, to be avoided. The final straw was the Republican refusal to agree to close a tax loophole benefiting high earners.

As explained in the Postcard in November 2012, the Act allowed the debt ceiling to be raised, at the cost of huge across-the-board spending cuts between 2013 and 2021, with only Medicaid, social security and war-related spending largely exempt. The share of the cuts for 2013 amounts to $109bn.

The cuts started to bite in March 2013 after last-ditch attempts to avoid the sequester at the end of February failed, and already there have been U-turns. Perhaps the most notable is at the Federal Aviation Authority (FAA). Furloughs – forced unpaid days off – among air traffic control staff quickly led to thousands of flight delays, leading to a rapid reversal of staffing reductions.

Many other agencies are now citing security fears in the light of the Boston bombings to claim exemptions – with attorney general Eric Holder moving to stop furloughs in the FBI, ATF and the justice department.

In the science and healthcare arenas, the cuts are kicking in. Limits on Medicare funding for expensive cancer drugs, for example, came in on 1 April 2013. Unlike the speedy reversal of FAA cuts, a bill introduced by Republican congresswoman Renee Ellmers preventing the sequester from impacting cancer treatments had not, at the time of writing, been passed. ‘Due to the cuts originating in sequestration, Medicare

‘Due to the cuts originat-ing in seques-tration, Medi-care funding for physician-administered drugs is being cut to health-care centres and forcing them to divert care to other centres and hospitals’

Renee Ellmers Republican

congresswoman

DOI:10.1002/cind.770 _ .x6 16