CPA Chair Jensen Issues Statement
President Biden released his budget request for FY 2023 in late March. The president’s budget is an important statement of priorities that Congress takes into consideration when developing its own budget and appropriations bills. For FY 2023, the president recommends an extremely modest increase in the regular NIH budget of just $275 million (0.6%), less than the projected rate of biomedical research inflation (2.6%). This small proposed increase resulted in part from the fact that final appropriations bills for FY 2022 had not been enacted at the time that the budget was drafted; his request represented a 5.6% increase over the FY 2021 funding level used as the baseline at the time. Based on budget documents released by the Administration, this proposal would result in cuts to many NIH Institutes and Centers, including the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID), the National Cancer Institute (NCI), and the National Institute on Aging (NIA).
While the budget includes a very small increase for core operations at NIH, it provides a sizeable increase for ARPA-H, increasing its funding from $1 billion to $5 billion. The president’s budget also includes a new proposal intended to prepare the nation for future pandemics and high consequence biological threats, allocating $81.7 billion (available for five years) in new mandatory funding (not subject to the annual appropriations process) to HHS to support these important goals. The funding is divided as follows (note: summaries of how dollars would be spent are from the FY 2023 HHS Budget-in-Brief):
• $40 billion for the Assistant Secretary of Preparedness and Response (ASPR) “to conduct advanced research and development of vaccines, therapeutics, and diagnostics for high priority viral families; scale up domestic manufacturing capacity for medical countermeasures; and expand the public health workforce.”
• $28 billion for the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) “to invest in the public health system infrastructure, support international capabilities for vaccine preparedness and medical countermeasure development, enhance domestic and global disease surveillance, expand laboratory capacity, further develop a robust public health workforce, and strengthen public health data systems.”
• $12.1 billion for NIH for “research and development of vaccines, diagnostics, and therapeutics against high priority viral families, biosafety and biosecurity, and to expand laboratory capacity and clinical trial infrastructure.”
• $1.6 billion for Food and Drug Administration (FDA) “to expand and modernize regulatory capacity, information technology, and laboratory infrastructure to respond rapidly and effectively to any future pandemic or high consequence biological threat.”
The budget also allocates additional mandatory funding for pandemic preparedness activities to the U.S. Department of State and the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID), as follows:
• $6.5 billion for the State Department and USAID “to make transformative investments in global health security and pandemic and other biological threat preparedness in support of national biodefense and pandemic preparedness goals. This funding will strengthen the global health workforce, advance research and development capacity, and increase health security financing to help prevent, detect, and respond to future COVID variants and other biological threats.” (summary from the State Department’s FY 2023 Congressional Justification)
CPA Chair Peter Jensen, M.D., issued a statement on April 12 which both acknowledges the president’s longtime support for NIH and biomedical research and expresses concern about the small, below-inflation increase proposed for the NIH base budget. It also asks Congress “to provide substantial funding to further support ARPA-H,” and “to fully fund the President’s request for mandatory funding for ongoing pandemic preparedness.” AAI looks forward to working with the White House and Congress to ensure that the NIH base budget receives robust increases even as important new initiatives, including ARPA-H, are being pursued.