The US Senate Appropriations Committee tonight approved a 2012 spending bill that cuts 0.6% from the budget of the National Institutes of Health (NIH) — and offers a starting point for negotiations with the Republican-led House of Representatives in the coming weeks. Significantly, the bill, which cuts the NIH budget by US$190 million to $30.5 billion, also includes money for a proposed translational medicine center whose establishment has become a key priority of NIH director Francis Collins.
But in an uncharacteristic turn, Democrats on the committee defeated, in a party-line vote, an amendment by freshman Republican senator Jerry Moran of Kansas (pictured), that would have restored the $190 million to the biomedical agency by implementing an across-the-board cut to all other programs in the massive bill, which funds the Departments of Labor, Education, Health and Human Services and related agencies.
Moran, who in his short time on Capitol Hill has become an outspoken booster of NIH, proposed the amendment, he said, because he wanted “to send a clear signal …that this Congress is not going to do anything but support and continue to support medical research.”
Richard Shelby (Republican, Alabama) a senior committee Republican, applauded the amendment before the vote: “NIH has been caught in the budget crossfire,” he complained. “The 190-million reduction was not based on committee concerns or [agency] performance.”
Every one of the 14 Republicans on the committee voted for the amendment, but every one of the committee’s 16 Democrats opposed it.
Just before the vote, Senator Tom Harkin (Democrat, Iowa), who chairs the subcommittee that drafted the bill and is also an ardent NIH supporter, was put in the uncomfortable position of arguing against protecting the agency.
“It sounds easy to do an across-the-board cut,” he told Moran. “But you take something like special education. This across-the-board cut would be a $200,000 cut to special education in the state of Kansas. That’s pretty tough." He added that "nationally, Head Start would be cut by 3,800 children”.
Harkin also said: "Cutting NIH is not a choice I wanted to make. [But] a [.6% ] cut to NIH is just something that I think that they can live with.”
“We’re grateful that the cut for NIH wasn’t worse,” said Jennifer Zeitzer, director of legislative relations at the Federation of American Societies for Experimental Biology in Bethesda, Maryland. Still, while her group appreciates the fiscal constraints the government is operating under, she says, “The bottom line is that we’re just really going in the wrong direction when it comes to funding medical research in this country.”
Nonetheless, in a sign of support that was encouraging to NIH leaders, Harkin also singled out several programs in his opening remarks. One was “the creation of a new center at NIH: the National Center for Advancing Translational Sciences (NCATS), which will be dedicated to translating basic biomedical research more rapidly into cures.”
The bill also makes explicit that the NIH’s National Center for Research Resources will be dismantled as part of the reorganization creating the new translational medicine center.
While most of the center’s proposed $723 million budget comes from pre-existing programmes being moved from other parts of NIH, the bill includes $20 million in new money for NCATS. That money is being appropriated through the Cures Acceleration Network (CAN), an embryonic, NIH-based effort to speed languishing potential drugs through early development. It was authorized in the health reform law of 2010, but has never been funded. While President Barack Obama has requested $100 million for CAN in 2012, the fact that the Senate has appropriated any money at all is “significant,” says David Moore, the Senior Director for Governmental Relations at the Association of American Medical Colleges in Washington. He notes that CAN “is one of the linchpins of the NCATS proposal.”
The Senate committee’s public signal of support for NCATS may be important as House and Senate negotiators hammer out a final 2012 spending bill in the coming weeks. (The corresponding House subcommittee has not passed an equivalent bill to that passed in the Senate this week.) Harkin’s House counterpart, Rep. Denny Rehberg (Republican, Montana), in June publicly opposed NIH’s push to quickly establish the new center and to dismantle the National Center for Research Resources as part of the effort.
In the meantime, a stopgap “continuing resolution” is expected to be passed by both chambers before next week, when legislators recess for the Jewish high holy days. That would allow the government to continue functioning after the 2011 fiscal year ends on September 30.
However, the Republicans who control the House were defeated today on their first attempt to pass this continuing resolution, which was introduced in the House last week and funds the government at 1.5% below 2011 levels through November 18. (It went down over an argument about whether emergency disaster assistance in the bill should be offset by spending cuts.)
The defeated stopgap measure did not contain a special provision called an “anomaly,” funding the NCATS, which Collins had sought in an effort to get the center up and running on October 1. Nor is it likely that whatever stopgap bill is eventually passed will do so.
Separately today, a panel of advisers to Collins with extensive pharmaceutical and venture capital industry experience issued a report calling the NCATS proposal “timely, important, and highly relevant to today’s challenges.”
Whether that kind of high-powered opinion will prevail with lawmakers remains to be seen. It was only last February that Obama asked Congress to grant NIH a $1 billion increase in 2012. It is a sign of the times that, seven months later, that request seems wildly unrealistic.