Check box change-up

On your federal income tax Form 1040, there’s a box right under your Social Security number. It allows you to check if you (or your spouse, if filing jointly) want to contribute $3 to the presidential election campaign. One eagle-eyed WORLD reader was reading the 1040 instructions—“This fund helps pay for Presidential election campaigns …”—and noticed this sentence at the end: “The fund also helps pay for pediatric medical research.”

What kind of research? she wondered. And how did this change come about?

The good news first: The research itself appears innocuous. The National Institutes of Health (NIH) explains online that the money goes to study childhood cancers and structural birth defects (as opposed to those caused by external sources, like thalidomide) at a genetic level. The 2014 law funding the research—Gabriella Miller Kids First Research Act—is named after a 10-year-old girl who died of brain cancer in 2013, hence the emphasis on understanding cancer in children. Children with cleft palates or hearing loss may also benefit from research projects her namesake law currently funds.

Miller died shortly after the 2013 government shutdown. She wrote a plea for “less talk, more action,” which was published shortly after she died. That shutdown, which pitted Republican attempts to avoid funding Obamacare against Democrats’ insistence on an all-or-nothing budget vote, found a human face in Miller. While her death had nothing to do with the government shutdown, each side blamed the other for the NIH’s 16 days without money for its cancer studies.

So why did the law divert money from the Presidential Election Campaign Fund? In the polarized atmosphere of post-shutdown Washington, the House majority leader at the time, Rep. Eric Cantor, R-Va., came up with a way to provide money for a popular, bipartisan cause without raising taxes: redirect to the NIH all money the campaign fund would have spent on party nominating conventions—about $12 million annually for the next 10 years.

While the law defunded party nominating conventions, the income tax checkoff continues to fund presidential campaigns for candidates who refuse all private donations. All major presidential candidates from 1976 to 2004 took the deal—even Ross Perot, running as an independent in 1996—but John McCain’s 2008 bid marked the last time a candidate from any party accepted such a grant in the general election. The amount candidates pass up reflects how much money they can now raise on their own. According to the Federal Election Commission, Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton each turned down $96.1 million.

Since both major campaigns refused the fund’s money, and since conventions can no longer receive it, the fund handed out only $1.1 million in the entire 2016 election cycle—a steep drop from the $239 million it issued in 2000, and less even than it gave Lyndon LaRouche in 2004. The money it gave the NIH in 2016 funded 10 pediatric research projects: less talk and more action, indeed.