Ranking Member DeLauro Statement at Fiscal Year 2025 Budget Request for the Department of Health and Human Services Hearing

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 2025 budget request for the Department of Health and Human Services:

Thank you, Chairman Aderholt, and thank you for holding this hearing on the 2025 budget for the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS).

I begin by welcoming and thanking my dear friend and former colleague, Secretary Becerra, for your public service to our country and for testifying today.

When President Biden and Secretary Becerra took office a little more than three years ago, our nation was in the throes of dueling public health and economic crises, making HHS a leader in our government’s response.

Over the last three years, thanks to the leadership of President Biden and Secretary Becerra, we have made great progress in supporting working families, promoting public health, and expanding access to health care.

While it is close to six months late, the House will be voting later this week on the fiscal year 2024 Labor, Health and Human Services, and Education funding bill. It is not a perfect bill, but it is a good bill that expands opportunity, supports families, and grows the middle class, and I encourage my colleagues to vote for it, as I will.

The bill is not public, so I cannot discuss specific funding levels, but I am especially proud of the investments in childcare and Head Start programs, which will support working class and middle-class families, and will ensure more kids benefit from high-quality early education programs.

Let me be clear: Much more funding is necessary to address the childcare crisis in this country, and the staffing crisis at Head Start, and I know we will talk about that today. But for the fiscal year 2024 bill, we worked on a bipartisan basis, under tight fiscal constraints, to make sure that children and families were the number one priority.

The bill continues to support research at the National Institutes of Health (NIH) to develop cures or treatments for cancer, Alzheimer’s disease, ALS, mental health, and maternal mortality, and protects funding for so many other areas of life-saving research.

We are continuing critical investments in our nation’s public health infrastructure, workforce, and data modernization at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (or CDC) and state and local health departments. The bill also makes investments to address our nation’s most urgent health crises, including mental health, substance misuse, maternal health, gun violence, and health disparities.

Critically, even with the restraints put on us by the debt ceiling deal, we put the American people first and rejected the obscene funding cuts proposed last year by House Republicans.

And for the past year, I have been firm that Democrats would not accept poison pill riders in the Labor, HHS, Education bill, including riders proposed by the majority that would block access to abortion and reproductive health services and block funding for gun violence prevention research.

As I stated, I am proud of where we ended up with this bill and look forward to supporting it on the House floor later this week, but having said that, there is still unmet need for services funded in this bill, which brings me to the President’s budget for 2025.

Mr. Secretary, I am pleased to see how you have prioritized the vast needs within your department’s budget for 2025.

The request for $119 billion to fund the HHS agencies within the Labor-H subcommittee will help lower the cost of living, grow the middle class, support working families, and protect women’s access to reproductive care.

The President’s Budget includes an increase of more than $1 billion for the Child Care and Development Block Grant and Head Start. Continuing robust support for childcare and Head Start will help us reach the President’s goal of every child achieving literacy by the third grade.

As President Biden said to Congress and to the nation at the State of the Union, quote, “To remain the strongest economy in the world, we need to have the best education system in the world.” End quote.

And every educator knows that building the foundation for a quality education begins well before a child reaches Kindergarten.

Families and providers are facing a childcare crisis. Parents are faced with either taking on extra work just to afford safe, reliable childcare, or forgoing work altogether, accepting lower household income and a lower standard of living in order to stay home and take care of their children. We cannot force parents to keep making this impossible choice.

Just this week, The New York Times ran an article on the skyrocketing labor participation rate among women in Japan, thanks in part to an expansion of childcare availability. The article says, quote, “These days, about 77 percent of prime-age women in the United States have a job or are looking for one. That number is about 83 percent for Japanese women, up from about 74 percent a decade ago and about 65 percent in the early 1990s.” End quote. Japanese children on nursery center waiting lists fell to below 3,000 this year from 19,900 five years ago. Putting childcare infrastructure in place will help American parents join and stay in the labor force here, as well.

We must support childcare and early education for our nation’s children, from all walks of life, so that they can reach their potential and become the best learners they can be, and so that families – parents and children together – can thrive.

As we begin to see the consequences of the disastrous Dobbs decision unfold across America, the need to support reproductive health and family planning services has never been higher.

The President’s request prioritizes women’s health, which includes:  an increase of more than $100 million for Title X family planning, as well as maternal and child health programs, including an increase of $27 million for Healthy Start, which reduces maternal mortality; and doubling of funding for the Alliance for Innovation on Maternal Health to expand the use of patient safety bundles, which address the causes of maternal mortality and morbidity, and to reduce the number of maternity care deserts.

These are foundational pieces of our health care safety net, and I will continue to fight to ensure these programs have the resources to serve every woman and child in need in this country.

This budget would transform women’s health research by doubling funding for the National Institutes of Health’s Office of Research on Women’s Health, which would fund research on maternal mortality and morbidity, menopause, sex differences on health outcomes, and a range of health issues that are specific to women.

When I joined the Appropriations Committee in 1993, I was proud to work with my dear friend and our former Chairwoman Nita Lowey in securing language in the NIH Revitalization Act mandating that women and minorities be included in all NIH-funded clinical trials, and in a manner sufficient to obtain information about both sexes and diverse racial and ethnic groups.

In Fiscal Year 2021, as Chair, I was proud to include a line item for the Office of Women’s Health Research, so it had a dedicated budget and grant-making authority to ensure there was specific funding for NIH-supported research that addresses issues that affect women, promote the inclusion of women in clinical research, and develop and expand opportunities for women throughout the biomedical research career pipeline. And this funding has grown thanks to bipartisan support for this office.

I also want to recognize the President for his Executive Order this week to further expand the White House Initiative on Women’s Health Research, which is building on our efforts over the past few decades to elevate research on women’s health to equal standing. This initiative is led by the First Lady, Dr. Jill Biden, and my good friend, Dr. Carolyn Mazure of Yale, a world-renowned leader in women’s health research.

I am pleased to see the Administration take further steps to bolster capacity for our public health agencies, including a $500 million increase for the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, including, for the first time, $20 million in dedicated funding for wastewater surveillance – which is a critical method of detecting and tracking the spread of communicable disease throughout our communities.

I am also encouraged to see the strong leaps forward in mental health support, including increases for programs at the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration (SAMHSA), which operates the 988 Suicide & Crisis Lifeline and Mental Health Crisis Response Partnerships, and the National Institute of Mental Health at NIH.

I am also delighted to see a robust – and desperately needed – funding level for the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services. CMS is tasked with doing extraordinary critical work in administering Medicare, Medicaid, and CHIP for the American people, with extraordinarily tight resourcing, and I will fight to ensure CMS is able to achieve its mission with the level of service and quality care the American people need and deserve.

These and many other programs at HHS, funded by this subcommittee, are critical to protecting the health and well-being of American families, through clinical support, public health and social service programs, and through groundbreaking research that keeps America’s health systems at the forefront of life-saving technological and scientific breakthroughs.

To protect and expand access to affordable, high-quality health care, lower drug and other health care costs burdening American families, and to promote early childhood care and education, I look forward to securing this funding for HHS and helping deliver on the Biden Administration’s public health goals for the American people.

Thank you, and I yield back.

###