Karen Petrou: The Casualties of Slash-and-Burn Regulatory Rewrites
There’s no doubt that many U.S. institutions have grown such long teeth over the years that they bit themselves in the foot. As a result, radical reform challenging conventional wisdom is long overdue. But, there are two ways to do this: the break-first/fix-later approach taken by the Trump Administration in biomedical research and other vital arenas; the other is to think first, then act decisively within the boundaries of current law or the better ones you demand. Radical reform to U.S. biomedical research is already leaving near-term treatments and cures on the cutting-room floor. If slash-and-burn transformation is also applied to financial-services supervision and regulation, systemic-risk guardrails could be unintentionally, but dangerously, dismantled.
The risks to biomedical research are not so much in what the Trump Administration has done, but that it’s more often than not done retroactively regardless of contractual commitments for continuing funding authorized under longstanding appropriations and by frenetic, indiscriminate firings of well-performing staff. You simply can’t suddenly stop a clinical trial without endangering patients and putting treatments years behind, if they continue at all. You also can’t stop basic biomedical research all of a sudden without leaving labs with a lot of mice, dogs, and primates to feed and no money for kibble. It also takes years to train good biomedical researchers; suddenly firing thousands of them endangers this pipeline and, with it, treatments and cures.
Biomedical research and financial-system governance have little in common, but leaving financial policy in tatters will also have unintended consequences …