Cancer at the Pentagon

Cancer Research, that is

Walter Pincus Saturday, March 12, 2011; 2:44 PM, Washington Post Staff Writer

As the Pentagon seeks to trim spending, there are some programs Congress believes the military can't do without. Among them: cancer research.

For almost 20 years, the Defense Department has been the recipient of more than $3.6 billion for cancer research. The programs have never been requested in any presidential budget, and are outside the Pentagon's traditional mission of battlefield medicine and research...

The pentagon is spending almost 4 billion on cancer research?  What, do they intend to inflict a long, lingering 20 year death on our adversaries? 

...Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates has said that the Pentagon, faced with mounting fiscal pressures, plans to cut projected spending by $78 billion over the next five years. He has also acknowledged that "not every defense dollar is sacred or well-spent...

 No $#!* Sherlock...

...The Pentagon's cancer research programs were initiated with a $25 million congressional earmark in 1992 for research on breast cancer. Since then, annual appropriations have increased, and the Pentagon's Congressionally Directed Medical Research Programs have expanded to focus on prostate, lung and other kinds of cancers. Most of the spending has gone to individual grants managed through contractors...By contrast, the National Institute of Health's National Cancer Institute spent $600 million on breast cancer research in 2009...

Hmm, so if the work is being contracted out anyway, why not let health professionals, like say NIH/NCI handle it?  Surely they would have a better at being able to judge whether the research being paid for was worthwhile.  IIRC, this shift of "military" funds to cancer research happened at the end of the cold war, when liberals in Congress were looking at military funds to cut or divert as part of  the "peace dividend", though to be fair, G.H.W. Bush was president at the time, and helped popularize the term peace dividend.

...Last year, after Gates first said reductions would have to be made in Defense Department health programs, Johnson received an e-mail from an officer of one of his constituent organizations. The officer expressed concern that the funds could be at risk and cited a Washington Post article focusing attention on the issue.

Johnson replied: "There are far too many votes for Members of Congress who DO control the funding of this program to not continue this funding - this is one of the reasons that Members who like to talk about waste, fraud and abuse who want to cut programs have such a hard time doing so - the political scaffold that supports these programs is often too complicated to bring them down."...

So, like all federal money dumps, this one has a big constituency working to maintain it, and very little recognition/opposition from the country at large.  With the current budget crisis, this program needs to be shifted by to control by health professional, and maybe trimmed back along the way.  Or alternatively, we could give control over weapons acquisition programs to NIH...