In 1995, as part of the US budget standoff similar to the crisis faced today, Republican lawmakers proposed to trim the federal budget in part by cutting funding for the US National Institutes of Health (NIH). Then, as now, biomedical researchers worried that the cuts would stifle innovation, drive young scientists away from the field and derail the momentum of promising research.
Fortunately, the scientific community had a champion in Congress in John Porter, a Republican representative from Illinois. As leader of the House Subcommittee on Labor, Health and Human Services, and Education, Porter managed to spare biomedical research and convince then-Speaker Newt Gingrich to leave research funding off the chopping block. Porter retired from Congress in 2001 and now serves as chairman of Research!America, vice-chair of the Foundation for the NIH and is a partner at the Washington, DC-based law firm Hogan Lovells. But his message clearly resonated — just last week, Gingrich, a potential presidential candidate, came out in opposition of the Republican-controlled House’s proposal to slash the NIH’s 2011 budget by 5.1%, equivalent to $1.6 billion.
Ahead of the looming 8 April deadline on the budget impasse, Porter spoke to Nature Medicine about what lessons can be learned from 1995.
Why are lawmakers going after funding for biomedical research again?
When you’re being pressured to make huge cuts and come up with big amounts of money, and you look at what’s one of the larger accounts, the NIH always comes up pretty high. If you take defense, entitlements and taxes off the table, what have you got to work with?
What did you do as chairman of the Labor-HHS subcommittee to protect funding for biomedical research after the government shutdown in 1995?
We assembled a group of four Nobel laureates and five businessmen and took them in to see the Speaker of the house [Newt Gingrich]. He gave us an hour, and the businessmen and Nobel laureates told the Speaker what a disaster this would mean for the future of the country, because the budget resolution then called for 5% cuts for five years — 25% overall — in NIH funding. To Newt’s credit, he said at the end of the time, “I think we made a mistake and we’re going to do our best to correct it.”
Instead of cuts, you actually secured a budget increase for NIH, and then put the agency’s finances on a path toward doubling. How did you manage that in such a tough political climate?
I was still required under the budget resolution to cut about 12% of the discretionary spending under the jurisdiction of my subcommittee. So, I drew up a proposal that pretty much flat funded a lot of things, zeroed out a lot of other things and gave a 5% increase to NIH and a small increase to CDC. But then I realized that if I put my bill on the floor with increases for just one agency and cuts or flat funding for all the others, [lawmakers] were going to amend the bill and move things around. So I went back to the Speaker and said, “I’d like to take the funding for CDC and NIH, put it in a separate bill right now and put it through very quietly and get it on the President’s desk.”
How did you convince the Republican leadership to go along with this?
I held around four and a half months of hearings on everything under my jurisdiction. We had leaders from each one of the centers and institutes, in addition to the director, come in to testify. We got a message from [National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases director] Tony Fauci and [National Institute of Mental Health director] Tom Insel and all the institute directors about what they were doing with the money they had and what progress was being made in each of their areas.
Is the current Labor-HHS subcommittee chairman doing the same thing?
The Chairman [Denny Rehberg] hasn’t held any hearings on NIH and time is passing. I mean, when are you going to hold them? I sort of despair that they’re not doing what the responsibility of appropriators is, and that’s oversight — to look at every program under their jurisdiction and to understand if it’s working or not. If you hold NIH hearings you’re going to see a lot of progress, but they’re not holding hearings.
Can the research community hope for much better than the Senate’s proposal of flat funding for the NIH next year?
We always hope for the very best. Research!America continues to lobby for $35 billion for NIH. We realize that that’s a terribly long shot. To preserve hope for people we have to do the very best to make it the highest number possible and just keep banging on the door until it opens.
What can the scientific community do to protect funding for biomedical research?
The very best thing people can do in the research community is to get their member of Congress into their laboratory to see what they’re doing, because once they connect how the research can make a difference in human health, they’ll be invested in it. Take a patient advocate with you — somebody who’s suffered from the disease you’re working on — and have them all meet together. I think that would make more of a difference than anything else. If you can’t do that, you can at least send an email or write an op-ed. Then I’d say get involved in the political campaigns and support the candidates who support the things that you believe in. Medical researchers are still citizens of this country like everyone else and have the same responsibilities. Go to the candidates’ debate, raise the questions, make them accountable, make them understand the importance of medical research. It can’t be done by people in Washington alone. They can do something but it’s the folks back home that matter in America.
Image courtesy of Research!America