Appendix F. 
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Second, no individual or cause has a right to sit at the government 
trough. Resources are scarce, and insufficient to support all worthy 
activities. People vshth different causes and interests compete to 
obtain them, and in order to succeed they are forced to bring their 
case to members of Congress. Funds are distributed only through 
the political process, within limits set by the Constitution, as the 
result of deliberation, lobbying, deal-making, and the like. 
Third, in a healthy democracy people will always have 
disagreements about what activities should receive government 
funding. Sometimes the disagreements will be intense, and 
sometimes not. Sometimes the disagreements will include moral 
disagreements, and sometimes not. Sometimes the political process 
will generate a stable compromise on the issue, and sometimes one 
side or the other decisively prevails. 
Fourth, while the Constitution prohibits the government from 
establishing religion, it does not interfere with the right of citizens to 
form moral judgments based on their deeply held religious beliefs, 
and to persuade a majority of their fellow citizens to enact legislation 
informed by those moral judgments, provided of course that the 
legislation does not interfere with other constitutionally guaranteed 
rights. 
Fifth, those who fail in the democratic process to obtain federal 
funding will always feel that they did not get what they need or 
want, but in the absence of a clear legal entitlement to such funding, 
they cannot properly complain that the government has thereby 
denied their rights or interfered with their liberty to exercise them. 
Sixth, those who lose have several alternatives built into the 
democratic process. They can try to persuade their representatives in 
Congress to reconsider, they can vote in others more sympathetic to 
their cause, they can seek to influence public opinion, or they can 
seek non-govemment funding for their activities. 
All of this is straight-forward and uncontroversial. It suggests the 
legitimacy, indeed the routine character, of the President’s policy. It 
might be regarded as the end of the story. 
B. Are There Special Cases? 
Although the framework laid out above may correctly describe the 
situation for most or even all federal funding decisions, there are 
moral and political reasons why people might regaud, for example, 
withholding of support for selected aspects of biomedical research as 
a special case, an exception that demands a different approach. 
The nation strongly and overwhelmingly backs biomedical 
research. And we generally leave the mapping of research strategies 
PRE -PUBLICATION VERSION 
