Ranking Member DeLauro Statement at Fiscal Year 2024 Budget Request for the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, Administration for Strategic Preparedness and Response, and National Institutes of Health

2023-04-19 10:22
Statement

Congresswoman Rosa DeLauro (D-CT-03), Ranking Member of the House Appropriations Committee and the Labor, Health and Human Services, Education, and Related Agencies Appropriations Subcommittee delivered the following remarks at the Subcommittee's hearing on the fiscal year 2024 budget request for the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, Administration for Strategic Preparedness and Response, and National Institute of Health:

I thank the Chair for holding this hearing. It is a critical hearing. I am pleased to welcome our witnesses:

  • Director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), Dr. Rochelle Walensky;
  • National Institutes of Health (NIH) Director Dr. Lawrence Tabak; and
  • Administration for Strategic Preparedness and Response (ASPR) Assistant Secretary Dawn O'Connell;

Welcome and thank you for the work that you’re doing. Thank you for being here today. You have all dedicated your lives to really what is sacred work: making our communities healthier and safer—by strengthening public health, treating illness and disease through research and development, and advising on and delivering emergency assistance during disasters and public health emergencies.

And given the painful health crisis we faced over the last three years, your collective dedication during this difficult period has been integral to bringing our nation forward. When I think back to where we were two years ago, I know it is thanks to your agencies that we have made such progress.

To support this important work and continue to make our communities healthier, this Committee made historic investments through the 2022 and 2023 appropriations packages in our public health infrastructure and the health and wellbeing of American families—but the price of not doing so is too high.

In the 2023 government funding law led by this Committee, we increased funding for the CDC by $760 million. That funding bolsters our nation’s public health infrastructure and its capacity, it strengthens our public health workforce, it helps state and local health departments keep our constituents safe, and it modernizes our public health data so that information is shared quickly and interventions to address public health needs are implemented in a timely manner.

And as NIH continues to be at the forefront of transformative medical research, we also included an increase of $2.5 billion to bolster the lifesaving scientific research the agency leads. This includes historic investments to support breakthroughs in the Cancer Moonshot initiative, Alzheimer’s, ALS, HIV, and universal flu vaccine development. We also included funding to continue confronting urgent health crises, including through gun violence prevention and opioid misuse research. These are national crises that we must continue to tackle head on.

And because ASPR has been repeatedly called upon to respond to emerging threats, this Subcommittee provided increased funding over the past several years, including an 18 percent increase in 2023, to advance ASPR’s efforts.

Today, we gather to discuss the 2024 budget requests for CDC, NIH, and ASPR.

Dr. Walensky, I am pleased to see that the CDC’s request includes a $1.9 billion increase to bolster our nation’s public health and help our state and local public health agencies strengthen theirs. I don’t think it’s recognized that our state and local public health agencies are the backbone of the work of the CDC and our public health infrastructure. You would make strides in infant, maternal, and behavioral health and gun violence prevention.

As you and I agree, CDC’s impact reaches far beyond its fight against infectious diseases. Because of this, your budget would strengthen our public health agencies so we can support food safety, early detection and prevention of cancer, and opioid use prevention. As I have said before, we must be ready for any current and future crisis – we must end the cycle of complacency that leaves us scrambling when a crisis hits.

Assistant Secretary O’Connell, I am glad to see that the request also includes new resources within ASPR to prepare specifically for future pandemics and biological threats. Your work is so critical to keeping us healthy and safe, as our country has simultaneously confronted Covid, mpox, and an infant formula shortage which your agency fought by helping to increase safe supply of formula for babies.

Dr. Tabak, as I mentioned before, NIH is so critical to advancing solutions to the most pressing health issues that face our communities. I appreciate your focus to prioritize innovation, including in nutrition research to reduce diet-related diseases. But given the importance of strong investments in biomedical research, I need to mention my worry that the proposed increase of less than 2 percent for the NIH is insufficient and threatens the progress this Committee has made through significant, sustained investments in biomedical research. Over the past 8 years, this Committee has increased the overall funding for NIH research by 60 percent, and we did that on a bipartisan basis. Finding treatments and cures for cancer, Alzheimer’s, Diabetes, infectious diseases, substance use disorders, and other debilitating illnesses should never be partisan issues — they impact every one of us.

Americans depend on the work that CDC, NIH, and ASPR does. They rely on you to stay healthy. You improve our quality of life. You ensure we are constantly developing new treatments. You protect us from public health threats, including from the Covid pandemic, which has so tragically taken more than 1 million American lives over the last 3 years.

That is why I must mention how deeply concerned I am over some of my House Republican colleagues’ calls for massive spending cuts to many of the programs that keep families and communities healthy. These cuts would be deadly and would be felt by everyone, including children, families, seniors, veterans, and our rural communities.

And I just might add, we deal with a lot of things through appropriations. Roads, bridges, helicopters, all kinds of areas. But no where is it more important than to address the issues that you all deal with. Because you are in the business of saving lives. There isn’t anything more important that we do at the federal level which is why we cannot sustain substantial cutbacks to the programs that you’re engaged in.

Two days ago on Wall Street, Speaker McCarthy reiterated Republicans’ intent to cut funding back to the 2022 level and to impose caps for the next 10 years. Make no mistake, caps are just another name for more cuts. Caps. Are. Cuts.

I am not sure that some of my Republican colleagues realize the impact these cuts would have, so I would like to run through some of them:

  • If implemented, 5,000 fewer research grants would be given out yearly and would impact the funding thousands of existing recipients can get. This means less research to cure cancer, Alzheimer’s, Diabetes, heart disease, and so many other debilitating illnesses.
  • The cuts would dramatically impact the CDC’s ability to support state and local agencies and weaken our public health infrastructure and capacity. More than 70 percent of CDC funds go to our public health partners, including those agencies—such extreme cuts would make our communities much less healthy.
  • Progress in ASPR programs that improve our nation’s preparedness for public health emergencies, including BARDA, BioShield, and Pandemic Influenza, would be taken back years, leaving our country so much more vulnerable to the impact of health crises.

These cuts threaten so much of the progress we have made in recent years. Please listen to what I am saying: they would be deadly. We should learn from the lessons of the pandemic, not send the health of our nation back years. It is unconscionable that we could support cuts to these critical agencies.

I know and I believe that our witnesses agree. And I know and I believe tht so many of my colleagues on both sides of the aisle agree as well. So, thank you for your dedication. I look forward to hearing your testimony.

And with that, Mr. Chairman, I yield back

118th Congress