House still at an impasse with budget resolution; Senate moves forwards with “Innovations” bills without clear funding mechanism.
House Budget Committee Republicans met earlier this month in another attempt to seek out common ground on a budget resolution. Following the meeting, it remains unclear whether they are close to passing a budget for FY 2017. The conference can't agree on the spending level of either $1.04 trillion or $1.07 trillion, and they will only have one week left to pass a budget after next week's recess before May 15th when House Appropriations Chairman Hal Rogers indicated that bills would likely go to the floor without a budget resolution.
On the Senate side, ASPET members will be pleased with the passage of the remaining innovations bills related to 21st Century Cures. These developments are positive but an important piece remains unresolved; a Senate agreement on how to increase funding for those agencies, and by how much, is still missing. The House version of 21st Century Cures includes $8.75 billion in so-called mandatory spending for NIH, dedicated money not subject to annual appropriations which would be provided by selling oil from the nation’s Strategic Petroleum Reserve.
Republicans in the Senate, however, initially balked at the idea of mandatory funding. But a chorus of Democratic lawmakers on the HELP committee, the loudest among them Senator Elizabeth Warren (D–MA), insisted that no innovation bill would get their support without such funding.
The chair of the HELP committee, Senator Lamar Alexander (R–TN), has been supportive of mandatory funding, but has noted that his committee doesn’t have the jurisdiction to call for selling off petroleum reserves to pay for the spending. Still, he told the committee recently that he was optimistic about devising a funding plan that could win a majority vote in the full Senate.
The leader of another key Senate panel signaled at a hearing today that he may be open to such “surge” funding. Senator Roy Blunt (R–MO), chair of the Senate appropriations subcommittee that oversees NIH’s budget, reiterated his opposition to a White House proposal to use mandatory funding for NIH’s regular budget in 2017, calling it “risky.” But he said he and Alexander have discussed a short-term “surge focused on specific projects,” which “might be different.”
NIH Director Francis Collins later explained in response to a question from Alexander, who also sits on the spending panel, which the agency thinks it could spend such a special fund on five specific areas without facing a “cliff” when the money runs out. NIH could submit a “work plan” with “timetables” and “specific dollar figures,” Collins said.