Congresswoman Rosa DeLauro (D-CT), Chair of the Labor, Health and Human Services, Education, and Related Agencies Appropriations Subcommittee, delivered the following remarks at the Subcommittee's hearing on the National Institutes of Health's fiscal year 2020 budget request:
Good morning, Dr. Collins. Welcome back to the Labor, HHS, Education appropriations subcommittee.
I would also like to welcome the five Institute and Center Directors joining Dr. Collins today: Dr. Diana Bianchi (Director of the Eunice Kennedy Shriver National Institute of Child Health and Human Development), Dr. Anthony Fauci (Director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases), Dr. Gary Gibbons (Director of the National Heart Lung and Blood Institute), Dr. Doug Lowy (Deputy Director of the National Cancer Institute), and Dr. Nora Volkow (Director of the National Institute on Drug Abuse).
Let me also acknowledge Frank Stephens, the fierce activist and Special Olympics athlete, who gave such powerful testimony about the importance of research on Down syndrome at the Subcommittee’s hearing on the topic in 2017, who is in the audience today.
Today, we will be discussing the 2020 budget request for NIH. I also want to note that I intend to hold hearings with additional Institute and Center Directors later this year. There are many institutes that have not testified in many years and I think it is important to hear from them.
The NIH is the leading biomedical research entity in the world. With each scientific discovery, each medical breakthrough, its research advances human knowledge, improves our quality of life, and saves lives.
That breakthrough can improve the life of not just a sick individual, but the lives of their loved ones, caretakers, and friends.
But, it is not just macro benefits. Local impacts are substantial. Hundreds of millions of dollars are coming into our community through NIH grants and contracts.
That is why I believe that funding this research has the power to do more good for more people than almost anything else within the purview of this subcommittee.
I am very proud that the Congress increased NIH funding by $9 billion, or 30 percent over the past four years. The committee has done this on a bipartisan basis.
These successes are laudable. Yet, the President’s budget would take the NIH in the opposite direction. The President’s budget proposes to reduce funding for NIH by $5.2 billion, or 13%, below the fiscal year 2019 level. At this funding level, NIH would be forced to make nearly 3,800 fewer new research grants compared to 2019. That is a reduction of 32%-to the lowest level since 1998.
At that level, NIH would be forced to drastically cut back its critical research. It would mean less funding for Alzheimer’s research; less funding for cancer research; less funding for infectious disease research. It would mean no funding for new areas of discovery.
We would never even know the important breakthroughs that we missed. As I have said before, you cannot do more with less-you only do less with less.
Let me say right now, and I believe my colleagues on both sides will agree, we will not be doing that. This committee will continue to invest in NIH research, despite the administration’s short-sighted and misguided budget.
I believe the administration is also being short-sighted with regards to HIV and AIDS. I appreciate their focus on combatting domestic HIV and AIDS. However, words alone are not enough. For example, the administration is not elevating the NIH to a prominent role in that initiative nor providing the overall resources to make real progress.
Decades of research supported by NIH led to the development of the very treatment and prevention approaches that have put achieving this goal within reach, specifically antiretroviral therapy and PrEP.
The NIH must be involved, if we are to continue to make progress in reducing HIV and AIDS, domestically and abroad. Yet, the president’s budget proposes to cut HIV and AIDS funding for the NIH by $424 million-14 percent below the fiscal year 2019 level.
And that cut of $424 million is nearly double the administration’s request for $291 million to reduce HIV transmission.
I said this to the secretary of the Department of Health and Human Services Alex Azar. The totality of this budget is contrary to the needs of the American people and the very promises of this administration. That is evident with HIV and AIDS.
In addition to cuts to NIH research, the Administration is also proposing a trillion-dollar cut to Medicaid, meaning HIV drugs will be unavailable. And they are proposing to cut the CDC’s Global AIDS program, as well as PEPFAR, which I will note was a priority of President George W. Bush. What happens internationally impacts us here too.
Further, they are proposing to repeal the Affordable Care Act, which would take away health coverage from millions of Americans. So, the sum of this budget is highly counterproductive to the goal we all share of reducing HIV infections.
HIV and AIDS is not the only area where the President’s Budget does not support the president’s ambitious claims. He boasted about a new $50 million pediatric cancer initiative in his State of the Union address. Yet, his budget is proposing to cut nearly $900 million from cancer research.
For all of our greatest health crises, we need our great health agencies to be fully involved in finding solutions. In recent years, we have provided significant resources to address the opioid crisis. I believe this approach is also necessary to address the public health emergency of gun violence. Last month, I chaired the first Appropriations Hearing on gun violence in 20 years, in which experts confirmed that the epidemic of gun violence is a public health emergency that demands public research dollars through both the CDC and the NIH.
NIH needs to resume its firearm violence prevention research initiative, which funded grants from 2014-2016.
Americans are struggling with the skyrocketing costs of prescription drugs. We need to be promoting research in order to bring more drugs to the market, to provide better care for patients as well as more competition and thus better prices.
A study published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences in February found that NIH-funded research contributed, directly or indirectly, to every single one of the 210 drugs approved by FDA between 2010 and 2016. The development of these drugs was associated with $100 billion of mostly basic NIH research over the six-year period.
This illustrates how damaging these proposed cuts would be to the biomedical research on which Americas’ health and wallets rely.
I believe my friend, the Ranking Member Tom Cole, will concur. Biomedical research is one of the most important investments a country can make - it gives the gift of life. We must be supporting it and we will.
Thank you again for everything you do. I look forward to our conversation today.
Now, let me turn to my good friend from Oklahoma, the Ranking Member, Mr. Cole, for any opening remarks he may have.
Source: U.S. Department of HCA
