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nobel prize
'Start Over From Scratch': Nobel Laureate Economists Denounce GOP Budget Bill
"The House bill addresses none of the nation's key economic challenges usefully and exacerbates many of them."
Jun 02, 2025
Half a dozen Nobel Prize-winning economists on Monday expressed their "grave concerns" about the sprawling budget reconciliation package passed last month by the Republican-controlled U.S. House of Representatives, warning that slashing an already frayed social safety net and exploding the record deficit in service of massive tax cuts for the wealthiest households will worsen the nation's economic woes.
"The most acute and immediate damage stemming from this bill would be felt by the millions of American families losing key safety net protections like Medicaid and Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) benefits," Daron Acemoglu, Peter Diamond, Oliver Hart, Simon Johnson, Paul Krugman, and Joseph Stiglitz wrote in an open letter published by the Economic Policy Institute (EPI), a progressive think tank in Washington, D.C.
"The Medicaid cuts constitute a sad step backward in the nation's commitment to providing access to healthcare for all," the economists continued. "Proponents of the House bill often claim that these Medicaid cuts can be achieved simply by imposing work reporting requirements on healthy, working-age adults. But healthy, working-age adults are by definition not heavy consumers of health spending, so achieving the budgeted Medicaid cuts will obviously harm others as well."
🚨NEW: 6 Nobel laureate economists signed an open letter opposing the House budget bill 🚨 The bill adds significantly to the national debt while reducing incomes for the bottom 40%, they say. The most acute & immediate damage? Millions losing Medicaid & SNAP benefits: www.epi.org/publication/...
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— Economic Policy Institute (@epi.org) June 2, 2025 at 10:16 AM
Addressing the bill's staggering impact on public debt, the letter asserts that "U.S. structural deficits are already too high, with real debt service payments approaching their historic highs in the past year."
"The House bill layers $3.8 trillion in additional tax cuts ($5.3 trillion if all provisions are made permanent) on top of these existing fiscal gaps—and these tax cuts are overwhelmingly tilted toward the highest-income households," the Nobel laureates noted. "Even with the safety net cuts, the House bill leads to public debt rising by over $3 trillion in coming years (and over $5 trillion over the next decade if provisions are made permanent rather than phasing out). The higher debt and deficits will put noticeable upward pressure on both inflation and interest rates in coming years."
"The combination of cuts to key safety net programs like Medicaid and SNAP and tax cuts disproportionately benefiting higher-income households means that the House budget constitutes an extremely large upward redistribution of income," the economists warned. "Given how much this bill adds to the U.S. debt, it is shocking that it still imposes absolute losses on the bottom 40% of U.S households."
"The United States has a number of pressing economic challenges to address, many of which require a greater level of state capacity to navigate—capacity that will be eroded by large tax cuts," the letter concludes. "The House bill addresses none of the nation's key economic challenges usefully and exacerbates many of them. The Senate should refuse to pass this bill and start over from scratch on the budget."
The so-called Big Beautiful Bill is now in the Senate, where Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) has vowed on behalf of Democrats to "fight it with everything we've got."
"The Republican plan is simple: Sell out working and middle-class families to pay off the rich and well-connected," Schumer said in a "dear colleague" letter on Sunday. "The bill would raise costs and taxes by an average of more than $800 for 40% of American families. Twenty million Americans would see their healthcare costs skyrocket, while almost 14 million would lose their health insurance all together, including millions of children and seniors."
Furthermore, Schumer noted that "11 million people, including 4 million children, could lose access to safe and affordable food, while every one of the 40 million Americans receiving federal food assistance would get less support every month. All the while, their radical plan would see double-digit energy cost increases for American households and businesses, and threaten close to 800,000 good-paying jobs in the clean-energy economy."
"Their entire agenda," Schumer said of Republicans, "can be boiled down to this: Billionaires win and families lose."
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Nobel Prize for mRNA Researchers Shows Power of Public Funding for Vaccines, Campaigners Say
"Public funding delivers incredible medical advances and that should be a priority for all countries, but pharmaceutical companies cannot be trusted to share technology with the world."
Oct 02, 2023
Scientists Katalin Karikó and Drew Weissman were awarded the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine on Monday for research that paved the way for the messenger RNA vaccines against Covid-19—critical work that, as campaigners quickly pointed out, benefited from substantial U.S. government funding.
Dr. Mohga Kamal-Yanni, policy co-lead for the People's Vaccine Alliance, said in a statement that "this award challenges the claim that it was solely big pharmaceutical companies who saved the world from Covid-19."
"Just like the Oxford-AstraZeneca vaccine, Karikó and Weissman's groundbreaking work on mRNA vaccines received a huge amount of public funding," said Kamal-Yanni. "Pharmaceutical companies have refused to share mRNA technologies with developers and researchers in developing countries."
The Nobel Prize committee credited Karikó and Weissman with fundamentally changing "our understanding of how mRNA interacts with our immune system."
"The laureates contributed to the unprecedented rate of vaccine development during one of the greatest threats to human health in modern times," the committee said.
As The Washington Postsummarized, the pair "discovered how to chemically tweak messenger RNA, turning basic biology into a technology ready to change the world when the pandemic struck. Their discovery is incorporated into the coronavirus vaccines made by Moderna and Pfizer and its German partner, BioNTech, which have now been given billions of times."
But the Post and other major outlets covering Karikó and Weissman's Nobel prize-winning contributions did not emphasize—or even mention—that some of the scientists' work was funded by the National Institutes of Health. Karikó and Weissman patented their findings in 2006 and later licensed the patents to Moderna and BioNTech, Pfizer's coronavirus vaccine partner.
According to an analysis by Knowledge Ecology International (KEI), Weissman "appears as the principal investigator on a total of 42 projects funded by the National Institutes of Health (NIH) between 1998 and 2020, representing $18,323,060 in costs."
"Karikó was the principal investigator of four projects funded by the NIH between 2007 and 2011, totaling $1,234,462 in costs," KEI observed. "In other words, the United States government funded and has certain rights over at least some of the foundational Karikó and Weissman patents directed to mRNA discoveries."
"As governments discuss how to prepare for the next pandemic, they should learn from the story of mRNA."
Throughout the pandemic and into the present, vaccine makers such as Pfizer and Moderna have opposed global calls to share their vaccine recipes and technology with the world, fiercely clinging to their monopoly control over production and using that control to force governments into one-sided contracts favorable to the pharmaceutical industry—even though their vaccines were developed with massive public support.
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study published in The BMJ earlier this year estimated that the U.S. government pumped nearly $32 billion into the development, production, and purchase of mRNA coronavirus vaccines.
The Biden administration, meanwhile, has declined to use its ownership of key patents or the leverage provided by public funding to force pharmaceutical companies to do everything they can to ensure the equitable distribution of lifesaving vaccine technology.
Kamal-Yanni of the People's Vaccine Alliance said Monday that "fortunately, Weissman is helping a WHO-backed mRNA program which aims to develop mRNA technology in lower-income countries, even while pharmaceutical companies refuse to share their know-how."
"As governments discuss how to prepare for the next pandemic, they should learn from the story of mRNA," said Kamal-Yanni. "Public funding delivers incredible medical advances and that should be a priority for all countries, but pharmaceutical companies cannot be trusted to share technology with the world."
Peter Maybarduk, director of the Access to Medicines program at Public Citizen, echoed that message, saying in a statement that "today's Nobel must ring as a call for equity and health justice, and a call to change a massively unjust pharmaceutical industry."
"Moderna, Pfizer, and BioNTech still largely control the available vaccines and in some countries have significantly increased their price, despite the billions in public funding on which the vaccines rely," said Maybarduk. "By supporting initiatives to share science and technology, and by funding vaccine infrastructure, governments can help blunt the effects of disease, and bring a coda of justice to a terribly unjust time."
This story has been updated to include a statement from Public Citizen.
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Demanding 'Global Peace Dividend,' Nobel Laureates Call for 2% Cut in World's Military Spending
"We propose that half of the resources freed up by this agreement are allocated to a global fund, under U.N. supervision, to address humanity’s grave common problems: pandemics, climate change, and extreme poverty."
Dec 15, 2021
In a move they say will save $1 trillion over five years "to fight planetary emergencies" like "pandemics, climate change, and extreme poverty," a group of over 50 Nobel laureates this week published an open letter calling on countries to generate a "global peace dividend" by reducing their military spending by 2%.
"Humankind faces risks that can only be averted through cooperation. Let us cooperate, instead of fighting among ourselves."
"World military spending has doubled since 2000. It is approaching $2 trillion U.S. dollars per year, and is increasing in all regions of the world," the letter--which is being coordinated by physicists Carlo Rovelli and Matteo Smerlak--states.
"Individual governments are under pressure to increase military spending because others do so," the signers continue. "The feedback mechanism sustains a spiraling arms race--a colossal waste of resources that could be used far more wisely."
The letter's signatories include mostly Nobel science and medicine laureates, as well as a handful of winners in the peace, economics, and literature categories. The heads of several national academies also signed, and Tibetan spiritual leader and Nobel Peace Prize winner the Dalai Lama expressed his "appreciation and support" for the initiative.
\u201chttps://t.co/mqiV2q7W4h It is out!! 50 Nobels, including the Dalai Lama, support the "Simple Proposal to humankind": resources to address the planetary urgencies by a negotiated global decrease of military spending. Please sign in support!! #GlobalPeaceDividend @GlobalPeaceDivd\u201d— carlo rovelli (@carlo rovelli) 1639437309
"Past arms races have often had the same outcome: deadly and destructive conflicts," the signers note. "We have a simple proposal for humankind: The governments of all U.N. member-states should negotiate a joint reduction of their military expenditure by 2% every year for five years."
"We propose that half of the resources freed up by this agreement are allocated to a global fund, under U.N. supervision, to address humanity's grave common problems: pandemics, climate change, and extreme poverty."
"The other half remains at the disposal of individual governments," the signers explain. "All countries will therefore have significant new resources. Some of these can be used to redirect the strong research capacities of military industries towards urgently needed peaceful applications."
\u201cMore than 50 Nobel laureates have signed an appeal for a "Global Peace Dividend", proposing that states decide a 2% reduction of their military spending and to use these funds to fight against climate change, pandemics, and extreme poverty. Read, co-sign:\nhttps://t.co/xjYjCEVOyN\u201d— Wolfgang Lucht (@Wolfgang Lucht) 1639517135
"History shows that agreements to limit the proliferation of weapons are achievable: thanks to the SALT and START [Strategic Arms Limitation Talks and Strategic Arms Reduction] treaties, the United States and the Soviet Union have reduced their nuclear arsenals by 90% since the 1980s," the letter states--its only reference to specific countries.
With a military budget of $778 billion, the United States spends more annually on its armed forces than the next 11 nations combined, according to the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute. The U.S. is followed by China ($252 billion), India ($72.9 billion), Russia ($61.7 billion), and the United Kingdom ($59.2 billion)--all of which increased their military spending in 2020.
\u201cU.S. military: "Disposing toxic chemicals is too expensive, so we have to release it into Okinawa's water."\n\nU.S. military budget: $778 billion\u201d— Rob Kajiwara \uff5c\u6bd4\u5609\u5b5d\u660c\uff5c \u9b4f\u5b5d\u660c \ud83c\udf42 (@Rob Kajiwara \uff5c\u6bd4\u5609\u5b5d\u660c\uff5c \u9b4f\u5b5d\u660c \ud83c\udf42) 1631068114
"Such negotiations can succeed because they are rational: each actor benefits from its adversaries' armaments reduction, and so does humanity as a whole," the letter's signatories assert. "Humankind faces risks that can only be averted through cooperation. Let us cooperate, instead of fighting among ourselves."
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