Top health officials pleaded with senators Tuesday to remove the “dark cloud” of budget sequestration and increase spending on medical research.
“We stand to lose $19 billion to sequestration,” Francis Collins, director of the National Institutes of Health, told the SenateHealth, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee. A billion and a half dollars was “taken away from our budget in the middle of the fiscal year. That resulted in inability to fund about 750 grants we would have funded.”
Collins, who noted the $19 billion will be spread out over 10 years, told the Washington Examiner after the hearing that all research will be affected by the sequester — a budget practice that caps federal spending increases. Sequestration, a mechanism of the 2011 Budget Control Act, has been in effect since early in 2013, reducing hikes in both defense and non-defense spending across the federal budget.
“When you are talking about a loss of this degree of support everything is going to stake some degree of a hit,” Collins said.
The Food and Drug Administration expressed similar concerns.
“I hope Congress will understand the critical role the FDA plays,” outgoing FDA Commissioner Margaret Hamburgtold the Examiner after the hearing.
Hamburg, who will leave the administration next month, didn’t offer an estimate on how much the federal agency tasked with food safety and pharmaceutical regulation stands to lose. The next round of sequester caps is scheduled to go into effect next year unless Congress acts.
There has been legislation introduced to protect fees paid by private industry from sequestration but it hasn’t gone anywhere. Drug makers pay fees to the agency when they file a drug application. Ordinarily, the FDA gets to keep these fees for its own purposes.
However, during the 2013 sequestration the agency had to fork over more than $100 million in industry fees to general fund revenues.
Democratic senators on the committee favor restoring funding for the health agencies.
“Congress has decimated the NIH budget and singlehandedly choked off funding,” said Sen. Elizabeth Warren, D-Mass.
Sen. Lamar Alexander, R-Tenn., who chairs the committee, said that sequestration caps were something he could look into but declined to elaborate at the end of the hearing.
Alexander opened the hearing by saying he was committed to improving the current drug development process.
“Today discoveries supported by NIH often do not come to FDA’s door for six, eight, ten or even twelve years,” he said.
