For your consideration: a Change.org petition asking the U.S. Congress to increase funding to the National Institutes of Health by 3% in next year’s Federal budget. NIH is one of the biggest sources of public research funds in the U.S., and its support goes well beyond things immediately connected to human health and medicine—I did many analyses for my dissertation research on Joshua trees and yucca moths on a supercomputing cluster supported, in large part, by NIH funds.

Some would argue that the private sector should take over some of the lost funding for academic, basic research. The sad fact is that the private sector does not support the type of basic research that the NIH does; they take the results NIH-funded research and apply it to drug development. In addition, many entities in the private sector are currently slashing their Research & Development (R&D) budgets! For example, Pfizer recently cut its R & D budget by 1.5 billion.

Consider the following numbers. For 2011 budget, U.S. spending on:
Social security was $2564 per citizen (20.8% of the budget)
Defense was $2203 per citizen (18% of the budget)
Medicare was $1569 per citizen (12.8% of the budget)
Medicaid was $1172 per citizen (7.8% of the budget)
NIH was $99 per citizen (0.8% of the budget)

The original idea, as I understand it, is for this to be an “open letter” to Congress from working scientists across the nation, but supportive non-scientists should definitely sign on, too.