FASEB President Testifies on NIH Funding at House Appropriations Hearing  

The House Appropriations Subcommittee on Labor, Health and Human Services, Education and Related Agencies, which Representative David Obey (D-WI) chairs, invited FASEB President, Robert E. Palazzo, Ph.D., to testify in support of increasing funding for NIH.

 
FASEB President, Robert Palazzo, Testifies
Before House Committee on NIH Funding

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The House and Senate Pass the FY2009 Budget Resolution

Yesterday, the House and this morning, the Senate passed their respective $3 trillion FY2009 budget resolutions with earmarks the House and Senate Budget Committees incorporated last week, thereby defeating the President’s effort to impose a moratorium on earmarks. The House budget resolution passed on a vote of 212 to 207, and the Senate resolution passed by 51 to 44. The budget resolutions are nonbinding and serve as guidelines for spending bills that will come up later in the year; in other words, the resolutions have no power or authority under the law and simply serve as blueprints for how the two houses of Congress should fund various government programs in FY2009. If Congress does not enact additional legislation for each particular area of the resolutions, then it will not provide (or appropriate) funds to a given agency or program, despite the text of the House and Senate budget resolutions.

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FASEB Sends Letters to Congress; Urges Scientists to Contact their Representatives

We are at a crucial point in the process for determining FY2009 funding levels, and the House Appropriations Committee has set a deadline of March 19 for Members of the House of Representatives to file their programmatic requests. Earlier this week, FASEB President Bob Palazzo called upon the E-Action List members to contact their Representatives and ask them to include an increase in funding for NIH as one of their priorities for FY2009. If you are on the E-Action List and received Dr. Palazzo’s message, please contact your Representative now. If you are not a member of the E-Action List, please join http://capwiz.com/faseb/home/. Your voice is necessary.

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Senate HELP Committee Holds Hearing on Biomedical Research Pipeline and Opportunities

The Senate HELP committee held a March 11th hearing on "The Broken Pipeline: Losing Opportunities in the Life Sciences" in coordination with the release of the report, “A Broken Pipeline? Flat funding of the NIH Puts a Generation of Science at Risk.” The report, which a consortium of research universities with Harvard at the lead produced, is available at www.BrokenPipeline.org and focuses on the deleterious effects the reduction in NIH funding is having on young scientists.

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Senate Commerce Committee Convenes Hearing on Basic Research Funding

On Tuesday, the Senate Commerce Committee held a hearing to explore the importance of basic research to U.S. competitiveness. The hearing examined research and development (R&D) budgets at agencies in the Committee’s jurisdiction, including the National Science Foundation (NSF), as well as interagency science programs addressing nanotechnology. Senators John Kerry (D-MA) and Amy Klobuchar (D-MN) presided over the hearing, and Dr. John Marburger, the Director of the Office of Science and Technology Policy, Dr. Arden Bement, the Director of NSF, and Dr. James Turner, the Acting Director of the National Institute of Standards and Technology at the Department of Commerce (NIST), testified.

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House Science Committee Marks Its 50th Anniversary with Bill Gates’ Testimony

On Wednesday, the House Science Committee held the first in a series of hearings to celebrate its 50th anniversary; the hearing highlighted the country’s technological advances during the past half century and examined the challenges ahead. Microsoft Chairman Bill Gates testified on the policies the U.S. requires to strengthen its competitiveness in the global marketplace and to encourage innovation as well as the role of technology in U.S. economic growth.

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Genetic Information Nondiscrimination Act (GINA) Inclusion in the Mental Health Bill

The Genetic Information Nondiscrimination Act (GINA) passed the House last week, attached to the Paul Wellstone Mental Health and Addiction Equity Act, a bill dealing with mental health parity. GINA had previously passed the House last April, but a legislative “hold” Senator Tom Coburn (R-OK) placed on the bill after raising concerns about it has stalled it in the Senate. In the previous Congress, the Senate passed a prior iteration of GINA, which FASEB supported, by a vote of 99-0.

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FASEB Urges IOM to Promote More Consistent Management of Academic-Industry Relationships in Research

FASEB urged the Institute of Medicine (IOM) committee developing recommendations for conflicts of interest in medicine to promote more consistent policies and practices for the management of academic-industry relationships in research, based on the principles of objectivity, transparency, and accountability.

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CONGRESSIONAL SCHEDULE

The House and Senate are in recess until March 31, 2008.

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