Late Friday, four key Republican health care leaders sent a letter to President-elect Trump asking him to retain NIH’s Francis Collins. The letter was signed by the chairmen of the Labor, Health and Human Services Appropriations Subcommittees from both chambers, Rep. Tom Cole (R-OK) and Sen. Roy Blunt (R-MO). It was also signed by Senate Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee Chairman Lamar Alexander (R-TN) and House Energy and Commerce Committee Chairman Fred Upton (R-MI).
These crucial Members of Congress are the Republican leadership in health and NIH and include, the outgoing House and Energy Commerce chairman (Fred Upton), Senate HELP committee chairman (Lamar Alexander), and the two chairmen of the appropriations committees that oversee NIH: (Senator Roy Blunt and Congressman Tom Cole).
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.
President-elect Trump has announced his intention to nominate Dr. Ben Carson for the Secretary of Housing and Urban Development (HUD). A former Republican presidential candidate, Carson is a retired neurosurgeon who was the director of the Johns Hopkins University’s department of pediatric neurosurgery. He received world-wide renown for separating twins who were conjoined at the head.
Carson has previously stated he was not interested in a cabinet post due to his lack of experience.
Here’s a selection of articles the Federal Relations team is enjoying this week.
Growing Rift – As Trump fills his Cabinet, the choices (and rumored nominees) are rekindling animosity between his anti-establishment supporters and more traditional Republican. Read more in The New York Times.
Keeping Carrier – To hear Donald Trump tell it, the story of how Carrier decided not to move jobs to Mexico started when the president-elect was watching the evening news about a week ago. Read more in WaPo.
Unproductive OSTP – The White House Office of Science and Technology office hasn’t been very productive under President Barack Obama, says the chairman of a key congressional research spending panel. And Representative John Culberson (R–TX) says he’d like to see it downsized. Read more in Science.
Whither DeVos? – If you ask what the recent appointment of Betsy DeVos as U.S. Secretary of Education means for higher education, a common refrain — even among education policy and advocacy leaders — is that it’s too early to say. Read more in Diverse Education.
Missed By How Much – There’s been so much talk since Nov. 8 about what the polls got wrong. The national polls are ultimately going to be off by only about 2 percentage points, which is not out of the ordinary historically speaking. State polls however, missed by wider margins. In 41 of the 50 states, the average of the polls underestimated Donald Trump’s margin of victory. But they weren’t wrong by the same magnitude or in the same direction in every state. The 538 has the margin of miss.
CZI –Seven months ago, Jim Shelton was hired by the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative to head up its education portfolio. CZI is the unusual new company created by Mark Zuckerberg, the founder of Facebook, and his wife, Priscilla Chan, to “improve the world for the next generation.” To fund CZI they pledged Facebook stock worth somewhere in the neighborhood of $45 billion. Health and medical projects will no doubt get the biggest share of that money. But Shelton is the guy who will write the checks for all of CZI’s investments and philanthropic donations related to education. That means he’ll have a lot of sway in an organization that is going to become hugely influential. Read more in The Chronicle.
Research Support? – Representative Tom Price (R–GA), the orthopedic surgeon and six-term congressman who President-elect Donald Trump yesterday picked to be his secretary of the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS), is a conservative spending hawk and fierce opponent of the ACA and abortion. But he has also spoken generally in favor of increasing funding for federal research agencies, including the NIH, which he would oversee if confirmed to the job by the Senate. Science looks into how Price might approach research funding.
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
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.
