House appropriations subcommittee advances $108B HHS funding bill
Read the full article in Politco Pro
Republicans on a House Appropriations panel advanced a bill Tuesday that would cut the HHS budget by 6 percent for the fiscal year that starts next month, far less than sought by President Donald Trump but enough to prompt united Democratic opposition.
In a 11-7 vote, the House Appropriations Labor, Health and Human Services, Education and Related Agencies Subcommittee approved $108 billion in funding for HHS — a $7 billion decrease from fiscal 2025. Trump had asked for a $31.3 billion cut.
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The details: The bill would keep funding for the National Institutes of Health, the largest funder of health research in the world, at $48 billion, according to a summary Republican appropriators released Monday.
Republicans intend to maintain “America’s edge in basic biomedical research for cures to cancer, Alzheimer’s disease, and rare diseases” and support Trump and Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s “priority of increasing research for other chronic diseases impacting Americans,” the document says.
The NIH funding is also “a necessary counter to China’s growing threat in basic science research,” the document says.
But DeLauro decried the bill’s nearly $500 million cut to the Advanced Research Projects Agency for Health, which the Biden administration set up as part of NIH to back high-risk, high-reward projects.
The House bill would reduce funding for the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention by nearly a fifth, or some $1.7 billion, to refocus it on communicable diseases “rather than social engineering,” according to Republicans’ bill summary. The White House proposed slashing the agency’s budget by roughly half, also aiming to refocus it on infectious diseases.
Research!America, a lobbying group for universities, disease advocacy groups, physicians’ societies and other organizations that work with the government, praised the panel’s decision to maintain funding for the NIH, but said it was alarmed by the CDC cuts.
“These proposed cuts, coupled with recent turmoil at the agency’s leadership, endanger our nation’s health,” the group said in a statement released before the subcommittee’s vote on the funding bill.
The group also asked the committee to sustain the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality, an HHS division that tries to improve the quality and safety of health care. Republican appropriators said they were eliminating it because its work was duplicative of other agencies’.
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