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Senate Passed Cloture on Cures, NDAA & Cures to Pass Wednesday

The Senate invoked cloture Monday evening on legislation (HR 34, 21st Century Cures) designed to spur medical innovation. Eighty-five Senators supported the motion to limit debate and proceed with a vote on the measure.

It takes two days for a cloture motion to limit debate to “ripen,” and there already is one pending on the defense bill that authorizes myriad Pentagon programs and activities. Other measures are in limbo, with some senators trying to extract end-of-the-year concessions by threatening to stall action and not consent to expediting passage of popular legislation. This means a vote is likely on Wednesday, when McConnell can stack multiple roll call votes together,  so Cures will be immediately followed by a big procedural vote on the FY 2017 NDAA conference report .

The legislation includes $6.3 billion over a decade deposited in three dedicated funds that funnel money to the National Institutes of Health, the Food and Drug Administration, and to the states to respond to the growing opioid abuse crisis. The drawdown of that funding would need to be approved by federal appropriators each year. The money would be earmarked for President  Obama’s Precision Medicine Initiative, the cancer “moonshot” program backed by Vice President  Biden, and  the NIH BRAIN initiative.

The Senate is expected to clear the bill this week and Obama is expected to sign it. Biden was presiding over the chamber Monday for the vote.

 

Home for the Holidays?

The plan is for Congress to finish all its work for the year this week, with a stopgap spending measure to fund the government through next Spring. When in Spring? That’s still a very good question. 

The House Republicans held a conference meeting on Friday that did not resolve how long the stopgap should last or precisely what level of spending it should allow. Without conference agreement, only a handful of House and Senate GOP leaders and staff will decide the substance of a bill that will shape government spending for at least the better part of the current fiscal year. 

House Majority Leader Kevin McCarthy said his goal is to complete all House action by Thursday, but the true deadline is this midnight on Friday, December 9th. That is when the previous CR expires. Failure to pass a new bill would trigger a government shutdown. The new measure will most likely extend current funding levels for most federal agencies through sometime between March and May. A precise timeline had yet to be decided.

Writing the continuing resolution, which generally forbids any new projects, also requires including provisions that allow agencies to make adjustments in their spending to meet changing needs; these are called anomalies. The Pentagon already has complained to budget writers that a long-term stopgap risks doing harm to needed weapons programs and troops currently deployed overseas. While each CR does have a limited amount of anomalies, do not expect broad sweeping increases, such as a multi-billion increase to NIH

As the House takes the first steps on the CR, the Senate will consider both 21st Century Cures and the NDAA conference report this week.

Foxx to be Chair of House Education and Workforce Cmte, Trump’s Ed Landing Team

With approval of the full Republican conference, the House Republican Steering Committee has selected Rep. Virginia Foxx (R-NC) as the chairwoman of the House Committee on Education and the Workforce in the 115th Congress.  She grew up in Appalachia without power and running water and began working as a weaver at age 12 to help support her family. These experiences convinced her that it’s an individual’s hard work, and not federal programs, that lead to success.

As the 73-year-old GOP lawmaker and former community college president, Foxx has been a staunch critic of the Obama Administation’s Department of Education efforts. 

She is a strong supporter of school choice and supports the president-elect’s $20 billion school choice plan emphasizing vouchers. Specifically, she wants to examine the billions doled out annually under Title 1 — a Great Society program that boosts funding to schools catering to poor students. The money is now considered a possible funding source for Trump’s school choice plan. Other items on her agenda: 

  • reexamine the role of the Education Department’s Office for Civil Rights, which conservatives revile for its focus on issues such as campus sexual assault and bathroom access for transgender students;
  • reverse a Democratic Congress’ decision to have the Education Department, not banks, issue student loans; and 

  • reverse regulations targeting for-profit colleges.

Mike Pence’s former general counsel has joined the landing team at the Education Department. Attorney Thomas Wheeler was named to the team Thursday. He served as general counsel for Pence during his time as Indiana governor, according to a 2013 press release from the Republican National Lawyers Association that announced him as a member of its board of governors. Wheeler also has extensive experience representing schools on legal issues, including civil rights-related cases, according to the web site for his law firm in Indianapolis, Frost Brown Todd, LLC.

House Considers NDAA Today

The House will debate and vote on the compromise National Defense Authorization Act today, likely before noon.

The measure is expected to pass, though it is unclear by how wide a margin. The White House hasn’t indicated where President Barack Obama will come down on the final bill, though it leaves out many of the most controversial provisions that drew Democratic opposition and a veto threat from the administration.

The compromise NDAA ditched the contentious riders, including provisions on the greater sage grouse and workplace protections based on sexual orientation. It’s also expected to include $9 billion on top of the Pentagon’s budget request, incorporating the administration’s $5.8 billion war supplemental request as well as funding to cover military readiness shortfalls.

For FY2017, the NDAA conference agreement would authorize Department of Defense (DoD) Basic Research (6.1) at $2.142 billion (FY16 is $2.309 billion), Science and Technology (6.1-6.3) at $12.489 billion (FY16 is $13.251 billion), and Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) at $2.957 billion (FY16 is $2.891 billion).

The NDAA conference also would extend the Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) program and Small Business Technology Transfer (STTR) program until FY2022 (Sec. 1834). The bill would not make any changes to the SBIR/STTR set-aside amounts.

The conference agreement would establish the Manufacturing Engineering Education program (Sec.215), to award grants to industry, non-profits, universities or consortiums of such groups, to enhance or establish new programs in manufacturing engineering education. The Manufacturing Engineering Education program language is a slightly modified version of the Manufacturing Universities language originally included in the Senate-passed FY2017 NDAA bill.

 The FY2017 NDAA report, summary fact sheet and joint explanatory statement are posted here.

The Senate is expected to consider the bill next week.

White House Supports Cures

Late yesterday, the White House issued a Statement of Administrative Policy (SAP) in support of the 21st Century Cures legislation, which is on the House Floor today.

The SAP expressly calls out the Innovation Fund in the measure, which targets funding for several of the Administration’s health care priorities, as a highlight of the measure.

Read the SAP here.