The Senate Appropriations Committee (SAC) has been busy marking up and advancing its fiscal year (FY) 2025 appropriations bills. SGO is specifically tracking funding and report language related to our priorities in the Labor, Health, and Human Services (Labor-HHS), Defense, and Agriculture-Food and Drug Administration (Ag-FDA) subcommittee bills.
On August 1, SAC approved the FY 2025 Labor-HHS spending bill, which includes $122.8 billion in discretionary funding for the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS), or a $5.4 billion increase from the FY 2024 funding levels. Here are some highlights:
- The bill includes a total of $48.8 billion in base discretionary funding for the National Institutes of Health (NIH) in FY 2025, an increase of 4% from FY 2024 enacted levels. The Advanced Research Projects Agency for Health (ARPA-H) is level funded at $1.5 billion. Notably, the Senate bill does not include the same restructuring of NIH’s 27 institutes and centers that was present in the House’s Labor-HHS bill.
- Additionally, the bill provides $152.48 million to the Office of Women’s Health Research and $14 million to the Building Interdisciplinary Research Careers in Women’s Health (BIRCWH) program, double the FY 2024 enacted levels for each program.
- The bill includes $1.46 billion for the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s (CDC) Chronic Disease Prevention and Health Promotion programs, an increase of 2% from the FY 2024 enacted levels, and a sharp contrast to the House’s bill which cuts the program’s funding by 20%. The bill provides a modest 3% increase to the Breast and Cervical Cancer program, while it level funds the Ovarian Cancer and Johanna’s Law programs.
Additionally, the Senate unanimously approved the Defense appropriations bill by a vote of 28-0. The Congressionally Directed Medical Research Programs (CDMRP) for the Peer Reviewed Cancer Research Program (PRCRP) and Ovarian Cancer Research Program (OCRP) received $130 million and $15 million, respectively. Notably, the PRCRP was level funded while the OCRP was cut by $30 million. We do not expect this cut to the OCRP will be included in the final FY 2025 spending bill. While SGO’s request for an endometrial cancer line-item was not included in the final bill, the funds provided for the PRCRP are directed to be used to conduct research in multiple areas, including endometrial cancer.
The Senate also unanimously approved their Ag-FDA bill by a vote of 27-0. In response to the national chemotherapy drug shortages, SGO advocated for the inclusion of report language to address this critical issue.
You can track these highlights and more in SGO’s FY 2025 Appropriations Tracker.
After the August recess, the House and Senate will have until the end of the fiscal year on September 30 to either resolve their bills, face a government shutdown, or, more likely, pass a continuing resolution (CR). We will continue to keep SGO members updated as the FY 2025 appropriations process continues!