In Brief
Congress Approves Deeming Resolution
On June 14, the House passed H.Res.467, a Deeming resolution, to provide budget allocations so appropriators can begin work on FY 2022 spending bills. The deeming resolution sets a $1.5 trillion limit on regular discretionary appropriations for the fiscal year and does not delineate between defense and non-defense funding. A Deeming resolution is a temporary measure that sets an assumed budget level agreement so that Congress may begin drafting the 12 appropriations bills that make up the federal budget. It allows the underlying work of appropriators to continue uninterrupted. Once a formal budget has been agreed to, it will supersede the Deeming resolution.
Appropriations Work Gets Underway
House appropriators are set to start marking up fiscal year 2022 spending bills during the week of June 23 as lawmakers scramble to fund the government before the September 30 deadline. Subcommittee markups are scheduled for the Financial Services and Legislative Branch appropriations bills on Thursday and the Agriculture-FDA and Military Construction-VA bills on Friday. We expect the committee will publish bill text 24 hours before the subcommittee markups and report text 24 hours before the full committee markups.
Democratic leadership is planning floor votes for the last two weeks of July according to House Majority Whip Jim Clyburn (D-SC). However, Senate Appropriations Committee Ranking Member Richard Shelby (R-AL) cautioned that he expects Congress will have to rely on continuing resolutions to avert a government shutdown, with stopgap spending measures lasting into the winter.
House Appropriations Chair Rosa DeLauro (D-CT) said Wednesday that her committee members have been assigned topline spending numbers for FY2022 appropriations, but the subcommittee chairs have not publicly disclosed their respective allocations, which will be subject to a vote by the full committee on June 29 and could still be changed before then.
OSTP Begins its Pitch on ARPA-H
The NIH Advisory Committee to the Director met on June 11 to consider the president’s proposal to establish an Advanced Research Projects Authority for Health (ARPA-H) within NIH. Modeled after the Defense Advanced Research Projects Authority (DARPA), ARPA-H is proposed to perform groundbreaking research and development in areas where current demand is insufficient for a robust private sector investment.
Eric Lander, Director of the Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP), and Tara Schwetz, Assistant Director for Biomedical Science Initiatives at OSTP, discussed the potential for the proposed agency to transform crucial areas of health care by funding and rapidly scaling new technologies, platforms, and resources that cannot readily be made through the traditional biomedical research enterprise or commercial activity. Dr. Lander said the recent pace of breakthrough discoveries such as the mRNA COVID-19 vaccines “challenges us to ask questions like, ‘What can we do to fully realize the promise by dramatically accelerating the pace of breakthroughs in medicine...to transform how we prevent or cure cancer, infectious diseases, Alzheimer's disease, and other diseases…to transform healthcare access, equity, equality, and reduce health disparities?’”
ARPA-H Proposal Resources